Garden redesign...

[BigSid]

Hello everyone, this is my first post, and I'm just after some opinions or advice on the plan I have for my garden...

The clown that lived in this house before me, thought it would be a good idea to lay a patio in the back garden from those horrible, dul,l grey, concrete 99p a go flags you find all over the place on most old council estates, intermingled with some patches of concrete (obviously where'd he'd run out of, or could be bothered to cut flags). The worst part is that it seems he stuck about a 2-3" bedding of building sand down and then put the flags on top, so now my damp course is about an inch and a half above ground level at best. Obviously this is not good...

So the plan is this... The existing patio area is about 2 meters deep from the house wall with a small retaining wall (made of painted breeze block????) which sits in front of the rest of the garden which is about 6" higher.

I plan to take out the retaining wall and it's foundation and remove the existing flags. I want the new patio area to be about 3 meters deep from the house so I plan to dig out the whole area first of all to the proper level that the damp proof course should be.

After that, I know I need 38mm depth for the new flags (Marshalls Firedstone, Fired York) + 50mm for bedding of 10 x sharp sand : 1 x cement but I'm not sure about sub base, depth or material.

The existing ground is very heavy clay, digging through the stuff is like digging through what I can only describe as dough mixed with glue!

I'm not sure what sub-base to use for this, or how deep to make it.

I will also be rebuilding the retaining wall, however it will be of engineering brick this time and not lightweight block.

Regards - Sid

[Tony McC]

Sub-base should be DTp1/DTp2 or 50mm crusher run laid in layers not more than 200mm deep and thoroughly compacted before plcing any subsequent layers.

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