Concrete under garden

MattressRick

Hi

It would be great to get some thoughts or advice on an issue I found in the garden of my house which is a new build house in an estate. The garden is your regular semi D sized garden.
I was digging up the garden to improve drainage as it is terrible in certain parts after any rain. But only a few inches below the surface is concrete. It's covering a pretty big area so far in the spot checks ive done, at the moment it's at least a few metres by a few metres. I understand builders rubble being there and can handle stuff I can get up with a spade. But this needs jack hammering. It mightn't be too thick but still, is there anything I can do to get the builder to sort this out? Bought the house a year and a half ago, builders a hothead and unapproachable so I can't see him coming back out of good will. Is there any building regulations for depth of topsoil? I can see similar enough requirements for the UK but cannot find anything here for Ireland. There isn't a hope I could plant even small trees at the moment and it's the fact it's concrete that has pissed me off so I don't want to be spending money digging up concrete they should sort out.
Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Bonzo Delaney

MattressRick wrote: »

Hi

It would be great to get some thoughts or advice on an issue I found in the garden of my house which is a new build house in an estate. The garden is your regular semi D sized garden.
I was digging up the garden to improve drainage as it is terrible in certain parts after any rain. But only a few inches below the surface is concrete. It's covering a pretty big area so far in the spot checks ive done, at the moment it's at least a few metres by a few metres. I understand builders rubble being there and can handle stuff I can get up with a spade. But this needs jack hammering. It mightn't be too thick but still, is there anything I can do to get the builder to sort this out? Bought the house a year and a half ago, builders a hothead and unapproachable so I can't see him coming back out of good will. Is there any building regulations for depth of topsoil? I can see similar enough requirements for the UK but cannot find anything here for Ireland. There isn't a hope I could plant even small trees at the moment and it's the fact it's concrete that has pissed me off so I don't want to be spending money digging up concrete they should sort out.
Any thoughts would be appreciated.

It could be possible to get him on the drainage issue as there's no soakage with a few inches of turf .
How much are we talking here 2 inches of sod then concrete or 9 inches of soil then concrete.
Ground drainage would be a major concern esp during
Heavy rainfall .
A more learnered poster might have the actual guidelines to hand .

MattressRick

Thanks for your reply.

There's probably 4-5 inches then the concrete. The drainage has been terrible, there was always very little growth in a large area in particular because of it.

muddle84

Is the concrete finished / floated on top? Or does it look it was just dumped there out of a lorry and levelled with a digger or rake? It could be just waste conrete dumped but it could also be cover for something else. It would be worth checkin with the builder what is it. If its cover for something you might be stuck with it. Very unusual though for something like that to be in a garden.

Irish Steve

might be a rainwater detention tank, so dont make a hole in it before checking it out

Lumen

It's not necessarily the end of the world if you have to leave it, provided that's it's only a couple of sqm, because grass doesn't need much soil depth, you just need to get the water to drain off the top of the slab.

It's common with new builds to have terrible soil quality with subsoil and topsoil mixed, and topsoil compacted, so adding an of inch gravel on the concrete, membrane, then good quality topsoil and the grass should be fine.

Obvs you might still have different issues elsewhere, like buried rubble and compact soil.

looksee

Have a look on Google maps street view and see what was there before building - even if the current map is up to date there should be a history view. Alternatively look on Land Direct and see what the land was previously, check out Planning Permission to see if there was any condition about dealing with existing buildings/structures, check older maps on OSI Geohive/ Base information and mapping/ older maps and arial photography.