Landscape gardener and builder in IJsselstein

IJsselstein is six kilometres from my door in Nieuwegein. That is the shortest drive in my whole working area, shorter than some jobs inside Nieuwegein itself. IJsselstein and Nieuwegein are neighbours, with only the Hollandse IJssel in between. In practice that means two things: I also come out for work that is too small to bring a builder in from further away, and I come back without any fuss if something is not right after the job is finished.

Garden and landscaping

IJsselstein grew for the most part after the war, with extensions that pushed a stretch further into the polder from the seventies onwards. In Zenderpark, Achterveld, Groenvliet and Hoge Biezen you find houses with a real garden behind them. Not a postage stamp on a shared courtyard, but a piece of ground with room for a terrace, a border, a shed and a fence that is due for replacement after two decades. That is the kind of garden most of my garden and landscaping work sits in.

What I do there runs from the complete layout to the yearly maintenance. Paving for a terrace or a path, groundwork, planting, a fence or a deck, pruning and keeping borders and hedges up. Often it is not a new garden but a garden that has done twenty years and has to start fitting the people living there again, because the children no longer need the lawn or because they have only just arrived.

Why I look at a garden differently

Before I went into construction I spent seven years studying agronomy, the science of soil and crops. That sounds like a detour, but it is exactly the difference between laying a garden out and making a garden work. I look at the ground and the water first, and only then at the picture.

That gets you a few honest conversations before a single stone goes down. Most of the money in a garden disappears into what you never see again: the base under your terrace, the drainage and the build-up of the soil your plants have to root in. Save on that and your paving looks lovely all through the first summer, and by the second winter there is a puddle standing on it with sunken slabs along the edges. That is not bad luck, that is a choice made earlier.

The same goes for the planting. A garden that stands completely full on the day it is finished is rarely a good garden. Plants need room to grow into, and the question I ask is not what it looks like in a week but what it looks like in five years. Sometimes that means buying fewer plants than you had in mind. I also know which species stand no chance on the shady side of a small town garden, and I would rather say so before you pay for them.

Renovating behind the front door

IJsselstein has a large stock of houses from the same generation, and that generation is now due for the same round. A bathroom from the eighties with brown or pale pink tiling, a kitchen that is still a separate room, a toilet with a leaking cistern. With a complete renovation of a floor or of the ground floor I take all of that on in one go instead of in five separate jobs spread over three years.

If you would rather do it in stages, the bathroom and sanitary work is usually first in line. I always work in the same order: strip it out first, then see what is really behind the wall, and only then order the final tiling and the floor. The other way round is quicker on paper and dearer in practice, because pipework from those years is seldom where you expect it and a wrong order ends up sitting in your hallway.

Carpentry and the small things

Carpentry is usually about made-to-measure work. A cupboard in an alcove that no standard size fits, boxing in under a sloping roof, a built-in solution in a bedroom or a door that sticks because the house has settled. That is carpentry and fitting and it is work where I take the measurements myself, because right angles in an existing house are the exception rather than the rule.

Then there is the list. Every house has one: the skirting board that is loose, the tap that keeps dripping, the locks and handles that stick, the outside paintwork that has been put off a year too long. Odd jobs and maintenance like that I prefer to bundle into a single day. For IJsselstein that works, precisely because the drive is so short that half a day of work does not immediately stop paying.

The town centre is another story

Around the Sint-Nicolaasbasiliek lies an old centre with narrow streets, and different rules apply there than in Zenderpark. Loading and unloading usually cannot be done at the door, so material comes in smaller amounts and is carried a fair way. Rubble goes back the same way. In old buildings walls are seldom flat and floors seldom level, so I measure on site instead of going by the drawing.

None of that is a problem, it is only time. And time belongs in the quote before we start, not in a bill afterwards. If a job in the town centre takes more hours than the same job in Achterveld, I say so up front and explain why.

Six kilometres is not a detail

I work on my own. Travel time is working time that nobody pays for, and that makes the distance to a job a real factor. From Nieuwegein I am in IJsselstein before the rush hour gets going, and on a weekday evening I am there and back just as easily for a measure-up.

That shows most of all in the aftercare. If a door sticks three weeks after the job is done, or a sealant line turns out to be coming away, I come round. Not as a favour and not after three phone calls, but because it is a quarter of an hour’s drive. The same goes for a garden: the first season is when you see whether the planting takes hold and whether the water really drains away where it should, and that is when you want someone who will come and have a look.

What I am not is a building firm with a planner and a site manager. I can only be in one place at a time, and in spring the garden diary fills up fastest. What you get in return is one number, the person who writes the quote is also the person who does the work, and there is nobody to point at when something goes wrong. Who I am and where I come from is on the page about me.

How it goes

You send me a message with what is going on and a few photos, of the garden or of the room inside. I usually reply the same day and come and look, because you do not judge a garden or a bathroom from a photo. After that visit you get a quote setting out what I do, what I supply and where the uncertainties are. If you agree, I put it in the diary and from that moment you have one point of contact until the last skirting board is fixed and the last plant is in the ground.