Garden drainage (legal?) question

MattressRick

Hi I'm hoping for a bit of advice from boards members on my garden.

We bought the house 2 years ago and it's a new build in an estate, it's a semi D sized garden.
Drainage has always been terrible and worst around the edges, but still bad in the whole garden really. I assumed it was simply packed down from when the builders were here driving machinery, skips etc. Plus I assume they took the top soil away and left poor clay at the top then.
Because we've 2 young kids I wanted to sort it now so I started digging it thinking it needed loosening up but there's a layer of cement type mix all over the garden. I can't get the tip of the spade down any more than 8 inches without hearing it clunk against the solid layer below. I checked all over the garden and it's exactly the same everywhere. It's like they emptied the cement trucks there at the end of a fill it something like that because the whole garden is the same.

I'd no problem with the thought of digging the garden but when I dig below that solid cement layer of a few inches, which needs a pick axe to smash through it, there's a looser form of that grey builders mix down to at least 2 feet deep. I actually can't find any soil, clay or anything brown down that far, so I've no idea how far this builders fill goes.

After 2 years is there any legal requirement on the builder here to sort it out?
I couldn't find anything myself online but would like to know if anyone knows, which would help greatly as the job looks much bigger and more expensive now than I thought, considering I'll need god knows how much soil to replace the builders fill.

Thanks!

spuddy4711

In an perfect world, you would have everything removed and replaced by topsoil, I’ve never heard of a

builder returning to do this type of work. Does next door look any better ?

The ideal garden would have well drained top quality topsoil 35cm deep, doesn’t happen nowadays.

Your surface water has nowhere to go. Look into creating a drainage system, a backbreaking time

consuming job with pick and shovel, or great fun with a mini digger. Post a picture of what you have,

others may have better suggestions.

Billgirlylegs

spuddy4711 wrote: »

In an perfect world, you would have everything removed and replaced by topsoil, I’ve never heard of a

builder returning to do this type of work. Does next door look any better ?

The ideal garden would have well drained top quality topsoil 35cm deep, doesn’t happen nowadays.

Your surface water has nowhere to go. Look into creating a drainage system, a backbreaking time

consuming job with pick and shovel, or great fun with a mini digger. Post a picture of what you have,

others may have better suggestions.

I am afraid you are a victim of the regular builders cover up - level everything and spread topsoil over it. You may be worse as it sounds like your garden may be the place they got all their materials dropped / delivered.
As said, good luck getting the builder back to fix it.

You could put in raised beds for the time being, and remove the offending material slowly over time.
it will be expensive to sort it short term.

magicbastarder

Billgirlylegs wrote: »

You may be worse as it sounds like your garden may be the place they got all their materials dropped / delivered.

yeah, it sounds like massive compaction is the issue, probably with spilled cement etc. 'helping'.
you've no legal comeback over the quality of the soil; i would say you would have more chance if there was clear dumping of C&D waste in the garden.

something similar happened my old boss - she bought a house off the plans, and they left it till the very last moment to hand the keys over, because they'd been using the back gardens as access to the rest of the site.the soil was massively compacted as a result.

MattressRick

spuddy4711 wrote: »

In an perfect world, you would have everything removed and replaced by topsoil, I’ve never heard of a

builder returning to do this type of work. Does next door look any better ?

The ideal garden would have well drained top quality topsoil 35cm deep, doesn’t happen nowadays.

Your surface water has nowhere to go. Look into creating a drainage system, a backbreaking time

consuming job with pick and shovel, or great fun with a mini digger. Post a picture of what you have,

others may have better suggestions.

Thanks for the reply.
Everyone of the neighbours has said their garden is very bad but I don't think they've the layer of cement underneath, there's are mostly compacted clay with rubbish like plastic buckets thrown in.

MattressRick

magicbastarder wrote: »

yeah, it sounds like massive compaction is the issue, probably with spilled cement etc. 'helping'.
you've no legal comeback over the quality of the soil; i would say you would have more chance if there was clear dumping of C&D waste in the garden.

something similar happened my old boss - she bought a house off the plans, and they left it till the very last moment to hand the keys over, because they'd been using the back gardens as access to the rest of the site.the soil was massively compacted as a result.

Thanks for your reply. I actually can get over the fact there's clay here instead of topsoil as I know that's the thing they do. But it's the layer of hard concrete or cement type mix that's very annoying, I think if I dug up the few inches of grass/clay over a bigger area I could expose a huge area of flat hard cement. Which would look like clear dumping of builders waste. But if there's no legal comeback here then I'm just going to have to do it myself unfortunately.

magicbastarder

we found massive chunks of masonry under the lawn in the place my wife bought with her brother years ago - easier to quantify that as dumping than what the construction company might just claim is spillage in your place. do you have photos?

Mango Joe

I bought my first house in an Irish housing estate in the early 2000's and was perplexed to be digging up tiles, bits of scrap metal, masonry, and even rubbish from lunches like empty cans of coke.

Mentioned it to a friend who soon informed me that building companies will routinely and almost universally scrape up every bit of waste and crap from the few months or years spent across the entire site, bulldoze it along all the gardens until its flat and then put the bare minimum amount of topsoil over this to seed a lawn.

Sure why would they have to pay a few quid bringing their own waste to landfill when they're only selling each and every house for what, starting at in excess of a quarter of a million plus ?????

Now most people can just dig out this crap (and pay to have it properly brought to landfill) worst case scenario they might need to buy in a tonne of better quality topsoil to make things work.

In your case though it's a lot different - It sounds like there was a load of cement/concrete mix that just wasn't going to be used at the end of the day and some absolute prick decided to pour into over the whole area of your back garden and level it out.

They would have 100% totally and absolutely known it would cause the homeowner huge issues in the very short term - But they were utter pricks about it and just suited themselves as they knew they'd get away with it.

Worse still any concrete mix like this that was covered over soon after would dry really slowly, have an extra long curing stage and set like granite.

I'd imagine you've slim chances here of any recourse against your Building Company but really in an ideal world some sort of qualified professional would be contracted to assess and state in a report that the garden was used as a dumping site and further to this left almost unusable as a normal back garden in the full knowledge that the concrete would render it impossible to carry out normal landscaping, planting etc.

The Builders should then be obliged to meet the costs involved in turning this back into the back garden you assumed you were in good faith paying for - I'd love to see a change here where a strong and determined residents association took this on and won - Maybe it would give the builders pause and end this crap once and for all.

GreeBo

Try to clear an area of maybe 1x1M and see what is there.
I think its unlikely that you have a layer of cement, more likely is that its just a crap load of rocks/bricks.

8" is pretty deep anyway, so I wouldnt worry about removing anything, your major problem is the compaction.

Assuming your 1x1 area proves this out, rent yourself a hollow tine aerator for a weekend and go to town on the lawn, this will break it up giving you much healthier grass and soll. You can go further and spread sand afterwards if desired.

If the 1x1 actually does expose a layer of concrete then your "just" need to break it up, removing it would be an enormous job, you need to crack it to allow the water to drain through it.

MattressRick

GreeBo wrote: »

Try to clear an area of maybe 1x1M and see what is there.
I think its unlikely that you have a layer of cement, more likely is that its just a crap load of rocks/bricks.

8" is pretty deep anyway, so I wouldnt worry about removing anything, your major problem is the compaction.

Assuming your 1x1 area proves this out, rent yourself a hollow tine aerator for a weekend and go to town on the lawn, this will break it up giving you much healthier grass and soll. You can go further and spread sand afterwards if desired.

If the 1x1 actually does expose a layer of concrete then your "just" need to break it up, removing it would be an enormous job, you need to crack it to allow the water to drain through it.

It's definitely more than rocks etc. Anywhere I've dug has a flat area like the one in the attached image. The spade won't go through it, it needs to be smashed with the jack or hammered with a spike.
I know it needs to be cracked to let the water through but the issue is it seems to be all over the garden. I then can't see any soil or clay below it either. So it looks like the whole garden was used to dump out big amounts of mortar.

aw

You could unfortunately be in the location were the mixers or concrete trucks were regularly washed out, perhaps.
I have seen that happen.

If it's like that all over, you really have two choices to make it nice and usable. Either dig some or all of it out and put in drainage and new soil, etc, or forget about a lawn and go for hardscaping with a number of raised beds for planting.

As an aside, I'm of the opinion that the main reason fake grass is so popular now is down to how bad builders leave lawns these days. Most people are facing the kind of decisions you are and go for a simple option.

Calahonda52

Image is poor, need a wider shot with less harsh lighting

GreeBo

aw wrote: »

You could unfortunately be in the location were the mixers or concrete trucks were regularly washed out, perhaps.
I have seen that happen.

If it's like that all over, you really have two choices to make it nice and usable. Either dig some or all of it out and put in drainage and new soil, etc, or forget about a lawn and go for hardscaping with a number of raised beds for planting.

As an aside, I'm of the opinion that the main reason fake grass is so popular now is down to how bad builders leave lawns these days. Most people are facing the kind of decisions you are and go for a simple option.

Even with astroturf, a drainage problem wont go away, it just wont be as messy (though it could get washed out)

OP have you tried drilling the "concrete"?

looksee

Maybe have a look at older maps or Google streetview 'look back' and see what was there before, is there any chance there was a concrete slab of some sort already there?