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rhowe
stevo_com
I certainly am doing, and I really appreciate the benefit of his experience.
For the garden fence, concrete posts have been vetoed from a "how it looks from our own garden" perspective. So going with wooden posts; pressure treated, 8ft long, 4"x4" sunk in 2ft with post savers to help against ground rot and a few coats of wood preserver. Not permanent, obviously. But we don't know if we'll be here in 15 years' time and Hopefully the above precautions will mean it lasts longer than the untreated stakes of the fence you can see collapsed in one of the above photos. That is about 30 years old. Once I sort the retaining wall, the ground will (hopefully) be more stable and because the area is fairly sheltered it won't be exposed to gales or the like. It doesn't really even need to be secure as there are many other gardens with little to no barrier between them and the park except for the 8-10ft wide moat/open culvert, so the chances of people just coming across the gardens makes a secure back fence pointless. It will be more of a fairly robust privacy screen for when people are walking past.
For the retaining wall, I totally accept that what Colin outlines would be the ideal solution (thanks again for taking the time to demonstrate and estimate materials/cost). But my problem is I don't really have any budget for garden works, it is all going on the house (I'm shredding the mountains of cleared shit and drip feeding it through the Croydon garden waste collection to save the cost of someone just taking it all away at once, which I would MUCH prefer to do). I imagine the tricky access might also push up the labour costs if I were to bring someone in. And if I were to try and do it myself, it would absolutely look like a dog's dinner from the park side.
Would the posts and boards be less than useless, given it's not much more than £200 for materials? Again, if I were to show pictures of how it looked before I started clearing or what others nearby have done, it absolutely can't be the bare minimum solution.