After demolishing the house by hand and then having to crush it all (due to being let down repeatedly by tradesmen), we'd really had enough of doing everything ourselves. We'd saved a lot of money, but it was all taking too long and our motivation was beginning to seriously flag.
Back before we started the demolition, we'd had meetings with a local landscaper, who had agreed to take on our garden, but unfortunately was booked up for 18 months in advance. So while waiting for the landscaper, we continued to slowly clear the site - including taking up some of the concrete paths that had surrounded the old house.
The big electric breaker had proved to be a very useful purchase.
Taking up the concrete around the house didn't take too long, but we were building up large piles of rubble again which would cost money to have removed. It's a shame we weren't able to do this when we had the crusher on site, but we could only afford to hire it for a week and there just wasn't enough time.
To prepare for the landscaping work, we spent a lot of time just clearing all the rubbish from the site; burning wood, making lots of trips to the dump and selling off anything we could. We managed to get a good price for the old roof slates on Ebay, so it had been well worth taking the time to remove them carefully.
In January, the landscapers finally arrived and they set to work on clearing and levelling the site. The intervening 10 months had seen grass and weeds growing through the piles of crushed hardcore and the whole area looked a bit of a mess. [click pics to enlarge]
Back when we originally built the house, we had to dig the foundations deeper than planned, so rather than buy in hardcore, the plan was to use the crushed stone piled up in the back garden to raise the ground levels in the front and around the side of the house. Recycle the old house to finish the new one...
The landscapers initial task was to clear the mountains of hardcore from the back garden. We had planned to do this work ourselves, but the landscapers suggested they do it instead, as they didn't want us piling up hardcore where flower beds might go.
Once the mini-digger got going, the piles of crushed hardcore soon started disappearing...
Some hardcore was used to raised levels on the east side of the house...
...while the bulk of the crushed hardcore was utilised at the front of the house.
We needed to shape the driveway and raise the ground levels so that it was possible to provide wheelchair access to the front door (in order to satisfy building regulations).
The landscapers marked out the proposed ground levels with paint on metal rods.
The crushed stone was brought round to the front using the mini-dumper and spread out to match the levels that had been marked on the metal rods.
Large blocks of slate and granite that had been part of the old house were recycled for use as a retaining wall/border for some of the flower beds.
Any good topsoil was kept aside and added to the flower beds as we went along.
After a couple of days, the piles of hardcore had been whittled down and for the first time since we bought the plot almost a decade ago, we could finally see a clear space emerging in the garden.
Unfortunately, that was not the end of it. Although the area had been cleared of crushed hardcore, the ground that been underneath the old house was unusable as a garden; the soil was dead with no nutrients left and was also peppered with yet more slate, stone and rubble. It was all going to have to be removed [sigh].
We unearthed several old pipes, cables and even a rusty old bike. And even worse, we were creating another huge pile of rubble that would need to be dealt with. It felt like we'd gone right back to square one...
The rubble would need to be taken away, so we stacked it all against the bank between the trees, so that a grab lorry could hopefully reach it from the farm track.
The more rubble we gathered, the more it was going to cost and it was disheartening to see the pile growing and growing...
Any decent pieces of slate or spar stone that we unearthed were set aside for use around the pond or other landscaping.
They looked a lot better after getting cleaned up with a pressure washer. Once again it was nice to recycle bits of the old house - most of this slate came from the old chimney or had been used as foundation stones under the house.
Everywhere we looked, we seemed to be uncovering more concrete and stone. Collapsed coal sheds, plinths for the old oil tank and large slabs of concrete buried everywhere.
We extricated this large chunk of concrete from the grass bank by hand... Years ago, the garden used to have a large model railway running around its perimeter and these pieces of concrete were the supports for the track, its bridges, stations, etc.
The landscapers were frustrated by the amount of rubble they were unearthing and the extra time it was taking to remove it all, so we offered to clear and level the rest of it over the weekend.
It was fun to get behind the "wheel" of a digger again... especially one with a heater.
After two solid days in the digger, we managed to get the area cleared and reasonably level.
The landscapers were delighted with the progress we had made over the weekend and they also managed to find a good deal on a grab lorry. It was just as well they had, as we ended up needing 5 loads taken away - that's around 70 tonnes of rubble!
The grab lorry in action:
With the rubble pile removed, we could finally begin to get an idea of the size of the garden and how the house sat within it.
It was as if the old house had never been there and we were really pleased with the (south-facing) space we had gained.
It had always been our plan to do this, but sometimes achieving it seemed a long way off... now finally we had a 'blank canvas' on which we could create a new garden. [click pic to enlarge].
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