Ask the Bear & Badger - The Bear and Badger

Diluted Dante

Does Big Amy?

Eric

AJ wrote:

I'm after a colour laser printer with scanner/copier for my sister, but it needs to fit on a 39cm deep unit. I'm having a lot of trouble finding anything at all that size; anyone know of a tiny MFP laser I might have missed?

This popped up on HotUKDeals the other day AJ and just fits your dims:

http://www.argos.co.uk/product/4258779?utm_campaign=11553376&cmpid=COJUN&cjsurferid=139204156966537882:iJTShRzZB9SJ&utm_medium=affiliate&utm_content=Pepper+Deals+LTD&utm_source=CJ&cjevent=e6ebaa06916411e8836a00440a180511&catalogId=10001&DM_PersistentCookieCreated=true&storeId=10151&_$ja=tsid:11674|prd:1546795&utm_term=1453124&referredURL=http://www.argos.co.uk/product/4258779&referrer=COJUN

No scanner though which is probably why it's smaller

AJ

Thanks. Scanner is essential, though.

Dinostar77

One for the gardeners / landscapers on here. My garden is 10m x 6.5m. A mixture of decking and some god awful weed/grass horrorshow. Anyway been getting a few quotes to get the lot paved. I said id remove the decking myself. Then whoever came in would have to go down a few inches remove the soil, flatten it, add paving and drainage. I also asked for a brick border to frame it. The quotes i have so far (around 3/4) are all in tge 6-6.5k region. Which is way more expenaive than i thought it would be.

Would it be cheaper for me to source the paving tiles and materials myself? Materials is quoted at £2.5k and labour 4k for example. It crazy expensive.

My question for any professional garden people on here, am i getting ripped off at that price?

AJ

Having your whole garden paved is a terrible idea at any price.

Dinostar77

Mate, last resort. Every house in my row has paved, eventually you give up on the nightmare weeds.

Yossarian

Yeah, that reply doesn’t really stop me siding with AJ on this.

AJ

I'm no gardener, but I'd be surprised if there's a no better solution to every weed problem than paving over them.

pantyfire

The Royal Horticultural Societies advice for having a lovely weed free lawn, when I was doing ours, is to have a nice healthy weed free lawn, I shit you not.
Are you the guy with a farm down the road that is inundating you with weeds, or is that someone else?

It's not hard to do though.
Basically strip off the top weed infested turf, then cover the lawn with barrier cloth for the winter. That will kill EVERYTHING. Then in spring add a few inches of topsoil and sew grass seed within two weeks you'll have growth, by the end of the summer it'll be pretty decent. The whole lot would cost you about £400 and that's including skip hire to get rid of the old turf. I did it with a 20m x 8m garden.
The quote for material and labor does seem a bit high, but I have no clue how much adding drainage will cost.

Go to the Builders Depot site for the materials and see how much it costs for paving slabs. I take it you are after concrete paving slabs and not natural patio stone?

We got patio some from eBay for a decent price.

Edit.
You'll still get weeds with a paved garden and you'll still have to do regular maintenance I.e. mortar in the edges etc... And it quite frankly just won't be as nice. Plus on sunny days it just reflects sun and heat straight right back at ya.

Stopharage

Paving your garden is an awful idea. Can see that detracting from your property if my estate agent buddy is to be believed. So many creative ways you could address the issues you’ve mentioned.

Personally wouldn’t want my kids running around in a concrete eyesore. IMHO.

Yossarian

Basically the response appears to be stop trying to keep up with the Jonses, the Jonses are cunts.

Dinostar77

pantyfire, our entire estate was build on old farm land. the soil is awful, my neighbour who is a keen gardener has relayed his lawn 3 times in the past ten years and also gave up and paved it.

The decking is 10+ years old and needs to come out. the patch that is suppose to be grass is weed city. last summer i worked on it and got a lawn of nice grass but the weeds return on mass every year. Its not usable for our little one as there are so many insects.

i didnt know it could potentially affect the house price.

Hodge360

Best way to a weed free lawn was taken off the shelves. Bloody EU thinking about the bees or something.

pantyfire

Honestly. Dig up the lawn turf. Thoroughly, thoroughly soak it with weed killer. Then lay black weed barrier cloth down, weight it down with some and old slabs and I guarantee nothing will grow and next spring you get topsoil and sow seeds or even buy turf. A bag of decent seed for that sized garden you could get for about £60.

I wish I had photos of ours before I did this, it was 15 solid metres of brambles that were 6 ft high. I'm not exaggerating, it was impossible to actually get to the bottom of the garden. I had to go at them over two days with a machete I looked like a vegan horror movie victim afterwards, covered in green sap.

pantyfire

But AJ has a point, you could patio half it for BBQs etc... But then stick a rock garden in with a gravel path winding through it, cut a couple of semicircle areas out and stick in nice bay tree or a fast going hollyhock, make yourself a... Shrubbery. Stick a sex swing in it or something.
It would cost less than 6.5k!

And I know nothing about gardening when I did it just common sense, internet, fuck it lets see what happens and a lot of elbow grease.

FranticPea

You should just totally pave the lot, and then go and pave over Pantys lawn too for a laugh.

GooberTheHat

I have to add my tuppence worth in too. I hate the idea of a concrete garden. They always remind me of a prison exercise yard.

AJ

pantyfire wrote:

But AJ has a point

I didn't; that was a typo. What I meant to say was that if there's a weed problem that can't be solved without paving over it, I'd be surprised.

Kow

My new garden is already tiled over and that's a major ballache saved. If I want plants etc I can put down those nice wooden plant boxes.

AJ

But you can't (well, I suppose you could, but it'd be weird) put enough grass in one of those wooden tubs to lie on in the sun.

AJ

Wait, what's the climate like where you are? Can you grow a proper lawn without a fuck-load of continual effort?

Yossarian

Dinostar77 wrote:

Its not usable for our little one as there are so many insects.

I didn’t know you lived in Australia.

Roujin

Dinostar77 wrote:

pantyfire, our entire estate was build on old farm land. the soil is awful

DOES NOT COMPUTE.

yourfavouriteuncle

If I can work out how to post pics from my phone from Croatia I’ll show you pics from my garden that has no lawn. Not having lawn is entirely different to slabbing over everything.

Re cost. 6.5k is minimum I’d expect something like that to cost but then if you’ve got someone agreeing to a proposal as horrendous as entirely slabbing over a garden then I wouldn’t have them anywhere near my home.

yourfavouriteuncle

yourfavouriteuncle

yourfavouriteuncle

yourfavouriteuncle

The hornbeam (the trees that form the boundary) need a cut but that’s been delayed due to having about 500 different nests going on. Garden is filled with butterflies, bees, 4 hedgehogs, spiders, frogs and yet it’s still totally usable for us as a family. Don’t just slab it - please.

yourfavouriteuncle

For reference this is what we had before....

Now I know I’m kinda cheating a bit as I am an RHS gold medal, best in show winning garden designer but just a bit of soil left for plants will make all the difference.

tigersgogrrr

I like your chairs.

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