Why Garden Quotes Are Given After a Visit, Not Over the Phone

Wanting a ballpark before committing to a visit is completely reasonable. The difficulty is that the honest answer to "roughly what would a patio cost?" is a range so wide it tells you nothing. Two gardens of identical size, on the same street, can differ by a factor of two, and every bit of that difference sits in things you cannot see down a phone line.

What genuinely moves the price

• Access. A garden reached through a close, a shared lane or a 700mm side gate means every tonne of material and every tonne of spoil moves by barrow. On a full rebuild that is not a detail, it is days.
• What is already there. Lifting an existing concrete slab, taking out tree roots or dealing with buried construction debris is work that happens before the job you are actually paying for starts.
• Ground and levels. A slope, a high water table or compacted clay all add time that a flat, free-draining plot simply does not need.
• Spoil. Excavated soil and hardcore has to leave the site and be disposed of properly. On a driveway or a terraced garden this is a real line item, not a rounding error.
• Materials. Natural sandstone, porcelain, granite and monoblock sit at very different price points, and the sub-base under them varies with what the surface has to carry.

None of that is visible in a description or a photograph. A price given without it is a figure that has to be revised once the job starts, which serves nobody.

How to compare quotes properly

If you are getting three quotes, the most useful thing you can do is check they describe the same job. The cheapest quote is often cheapest because it is for less work, and the difference is usually underground where you will not see it until it fails.

• What depth of sub-base is going in, and is it compacted in layers?
• Is the paving laid on a full mortar bed, or spot-bedded on five dabs?
• What are the falls, and where is the water actually going?
• Is spoil removal and disposal included, or added later?
• Who does the work: the person quoting, their own team, or a subcontractor?

Those five questions separate quotes far more reliably than the headline number does. A driveway laid on 50mm of sand will look identical to one on a properly compacted sub-base for about two winters.

What the visit involves

It is short. Someone looks at the ground, checks the access, works out where water is going and talks through what you actually want the space to do. That last part matters more than it sounds: a good number of jobs change shape at this stage, usually because the thing someone asked for is not the cheapest way to get the result they described.

There is no charge for it and no obligation afterwards. Work is available as a one-off clearance, a tidy-up before a sale, a single landscaping project, or as a regular arrangement through the growing season. The principle is the same either way: the garden gets seen before a number is attached to it.

You can see what other customers have said on the reviews page, or get in touch to arrange a visit.