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Digging my levelled garden
whitelaura422
Posts: 2
hi all! Looking for a bit of advice. My partner and I just bought this house and are looking to do the garden. As you can imagine money is too tight to get anyone in to do it!What we want to do it is dig the top level up to where the current decking is and fill in the hole next to it so it is a full deck along the whole house. My questions for you are:
Is it safe to do So? I'm worried about changing it and making the ground by the house unsafe. Would I need planning permission?
Also would we be able to literally dig up the old soil and just plonk it down to fill the gap?
Thank you I'm advance! Any help is greatly appreciated!
0
Posts
Decking with the proper supports would go over the gap by itself. You would need to do some research on how but it's doable.
1. You will be raising the ground level against a 6ft fence and you will be looking straight into your neighbours house and garden. Your neighbours are likely to complain. I see the neighbours on the right hand side have an extension so this isn't a problem on that side.
2. If you do move the soil you would have to retain it along the left-hand boundary so it does not sit against the fence. You would have to extend the decking across the back of the house so that there is no soil sitting against the house walls either.
3. I imagine the soil under the raised grass area is not all beautiful topsoil and think it likely the lower portion may be builders spoil used to make up the height. Something to be aware of as a) you will have to get rid of it and 2) you then won't have enough soil for the left-hand side to make up the desired height. You would have to bring soil in.
4. When you do move soil it fluffs up by around 25% so you will need to let it settle to find the right level.
I was thinking something similar to this where you treat it as a slope