The £20k Swimming Pool Nobody Ordered
Your old garden drained perfectly well. Then £20k of porcelain, retaining walls and raised beds went in. One Dorset downpour later, there's a lake against the back doors. Here's what went wrong.
The old garden wasn't exactly impressive.
Bit of grass. Some tired paving. Muddy flowerbeds around the edges.
But it drained.
Then somebody spends £20,000 transforming it.
Sixty square metres of porcelain goes down. Raised beds go in. New retaining walls. Everything looks lovely when the landscaper takes the final photos.
Then Dorset gets a proper downpour.
Suddenly there's two inches of water across the patio and a small lake sitting against the back doors.
Congratulations.
You've accidentally bought a swimming pool.
You Just Covered the Garden in Stone
This is the bit that gets ignored.
Your old lawn absorbed water.
The flowerbeds absorbed water.
Even the knackered old paving probably had gaps and broken areas where rain disappeared into the ground.
Then somebody covers most of it with porcelain.
Porcelain doesn't absorb the rain.
That water now has to go somewhere else.
And we're not talking about a couple of buckets.
Put heavy rain across 60 square metres of hard landscaping and you're dealing with thousands of litres of water.
If nobody decided where that water was going before laying the patio, you've got a problem.
Water Always Finds the Lowest Point
Rain doesn't care how much your patio cost.
It runs downhill.
Every patio needs properly designed falls directing water towards somewhere safe.
Get those levels wrong and the water heads straight towards the house.
We've seen patios where you can physically watch rainwater running towards the bifold doors.
That's not bad luck.
That's bad landscaping.
By the time somebody notices, the porcelain is already down, the pointing is finished and the customer has paid.
Fixing the levels now could mean ripping the whole thing back up.
The Raised Beds Made it Worse
It isn't always just the patio.
A proper landscaping project changes the entire garden.
New retaining wall over there.
Raised planter here.
Steps through the middle.
Maybe a garden room at the back.
Every one of those changes affects how water moves across the plot.
Build a retaining wall across an old drainage route and you've effectively built a dam.
Raise one section of the garden and the water gets pushed somewhere else.
The whole garden needs to work together.
You can't design each bit separately and hope the rain figures it out.
A Drainage Channel Isn't a Magic Fix
This is another one we see.
Garden starts flooding.
Builder comes back and sticks an ACO channel across the patio.
"Sorted."
Not necessarily.
Where does the channel go?
If you've collected hundreds of litres of water and connected it to nowhere useful, you've just moved the puddle underground.
Drainage channels collect water.
They don't make it disappear.
Depending on the site, that water may need directing towards a properly designed soakaway or another suitable drainage solution.
That's why garden drainage in Bournemouth needs thinking about before the paving starts.
We Work Out Where the Rain Goes First
Before we're interested in laying expensive porcelain, we're interested in levels.
Where's the house?
Where are the doors and airbricks?
Which direction does the garden naturally fall?
What's being covered?
What's being raised?
Where can the water safely go?
Then we design the hard landscaping around those answers.
Falls get built into the patio.
Drainage channels go where they're actually needed.
Soakaways are positioned and built properly where appropriate.
Levels around the property stay safe.
None of this is particularly exciting.
Nobody puts a photo of their underground drainage on Instagram.
But when November turns up and Bournemouth gets hammered with rain, that's the bit stopping £20,000 worth of landscaping from turning into a paddling pool.
Stop letting cheap builders ruin your property. Pop down and see the lads at 78 Alma Rd, Bournemouth BH9 1AN, UK, or ring the site phone on 07835 390845.
