I hear this from time to time. A client will tell me they got a competitive quote 30% cheaper than ours for the same job. When this happens, my first question is never “how did they do that?” No. It’s always “what did they leave out?”
You see in landscaping, it’s easy to cut corners to cut costs. And the easiest corners to cut are the ones you, the client, will never see. Because they are basically invisible. Nobody is going to stand in their finished garden and see the missing layer of crushed rock under their paving, the undersized footing under their retaining wall, or the dripper lines that are spaced too far apart under their lawn. It all appears to be fine on handover day.
The problem is what happens after 2 years, 5 years or 10 years, when the things you can’t see underneath the things you can see, start to fail.
I’ve spent 35 years watching people find out the hard way that it’s the hidden things that will cause your dream garden to fail. Because I can assure you, the cost of repairing or replacing things is always, always, at least 2 to 3 times the money you thought you’d saved on the original quote.
If you’d like to save yourself from getting misled on a landscaping quote, read on. This article could be the most important one you’ll ever read.
It will walk you through the most common ways that critical corners get cut in landscaping. And the consequences that happen when they do.
The hidden paving shortcut nobody ever sees
Under every concrete slab on which your paving sits, there’s supposed to be a layer of compacted crushed rock. This is meant to be put down before the concrete is poured. Why? Because Melbourne’s soils are notoriously reactive. They swell and shrink with changing moisture levels, and that movement has to go somewhere. The crushed rock is the buffer that absorbs that movement instead of it being transferred to the concrete. Skip that protective layer and pave straight onto clay, and you’ve saved some real money. But you’ve also removed the one thing stopping all that movement from eventually cracking the concrete and your paving.
Other shortcuts can be applied to the concrete itself. The thickness of the concrete base, its strength, and how much steel reinforcement goes into it are all things a client can’t see once the pavers are down. Because a concrete slab that’s thinner, weaker, or lighter on steel than it should be, looks identical to a proper one on the day it’s laid. And if it’s laid without a base of crushed rock, you can understand how it’s going to fail even quicker. Another shortcut that might save money in the build, but will cost money in the repair.
Then there’s the finishing job on the pavers themselves. A cement mixer full of sand and cement will grout the gaps between the pavers. So will a bagged product like Mapei, which is purpose built for the job with flexibility built in and a consistent colour from batch to batch. The first one is cheaper. But the second one is designed to move with the pavers instead of cracking against them. And then there’s the glue that’s meant to go on the back of every paver before it’s set down. That can simply be left out too. Again these tricks will save money, in the short-term.
None of these will ever show up in a photo. But they will all show up in the callback you have to make to whoever did your paving. And they will certainly show up in the money you have to pay for the repair to your once beautiful paving.
The little known difference between render and bagging
This one often catches people out because the words themselves sound close enough to each other to seem like the same thing. Render is a proper cement based coating applied to a surface, often on a newly built wall, to a defined thickness and finish. It is both durable and long-lasting. Bagging is simply a mortar spread on thinly with a sponge or a cloth. It’s a different product that does a completely different job. It’s a lot faster and cheaper to apply.
The terms are so often confused that we’ve actually quoted jobs that included a render and lost them to a cheaper quote that the client said also included a render. Then the client has called us back months later asking why it was cracking and didn’t look right. I went to see the problem and discovered it was never rendered. It was bagged. Nobody told them the difference. It’s frustrating because that difference was exactly what made the other quote come in lower.
Of course, it can be more expensive to go over it again with proper render than it would have cost to just have it rendered properly in the first place.
The unseen world beneath your plants
Soil conditioning is completely invisible on the day your garden is planted and everything looks green. But whether the soil was turned over properly, whether some compost or proper fertiliser went in, or whether gypsum was used to open up a heavy clay soil so water can actually move through it, none of this shows up on the surface. Neither does buying plants from a cheaper nursery instead of good quality stock.
Skip the soil prep and buy the cheaper plants, and you can genuinely plant a garden for about 20% less. For a while it will look fine. Then the plants that were never given the right conditions to establish themselves properly will start to struggle, and you’re replacing them within a year or two. And having to rework the soil as well. You end up paying twice as much for something done wrong that should have been done right once.
Skipping permits is cheaper. But it’s a ticking clock…
I’ve heard people tell others over dinner, at functions and in meetings with potential clients that they don’t need a building permit for decking when, in nearly every case, they do. Sure, skipping a permit saves money and time up front. But inevitably, sometimes years later, the council will find out. Sometimes the illegal deck issue will pop up when the unsuspecting person goes to sell their house. Sometimes the council just finds out (perhaps through an unfriendly neighbour). And these days it might even be exposed through a council search on Google Maps. (Yes they are doing that these days!)
However it happens, when the council finds out the structure was never approved and never met the building code, the client is told to remove it. Not repair it. Not modify it. But tear it down completely. That’s no longer a corner cut quietly in the background that won’t affect you. That’s a structure you paid for, twice! Once to build and once to pull down again. Or three times if you really want a deck, because you have to start the whole process all over again, including getting the proper permit this time.
Hidden behind and under a retaining wall lie potentially disastrous shortcuts
Every rendered block retaining wall should have a coating such as bitumen on the back face, with core flute added where needed, and have proper drainage behind it so water doesn’t sit against the wall.
If you skip the coating and forego the proper drainage, the wall will look exactly the same the day it’s finished. But what you’ve actually built is a wall that will hold moisture against itself until it cracks or damp starts working through to the finished side. At this point you have the risk of a total wall collapse, along with whatever is sitting above it.
The same goes for what’s under the wall. An engineer will tell you the exact depth and required reinforcement a footing needs to be in order to hold everything that’s above it. (Footing is the foundation of the wall.) Skip the engineering, dig a shallower footing, and go light on the steel supports, and you can genuinely save a lot of money on labour, concrete, and steel. A landscaper who’s built a lot of walls and knows exactly what they’re doing might get away with it. The key word here is MIGHT. Reality is that most corners cut on a retaining wall don’t get discovered until the wall itself tells you. But then it’s a complete rebuild, not a repair.
The pool footings most people don’t want to pay for but absolutely need
To support a pool, especially a fibreglass one on a sloping block, an engineer will often call for piers of a specific diameter and depth. Sometimes they will be 1, 2, or even 3 metres deep. Generally they will be full of steel and expensive to excavate. A landscaper who tells you that you don’t need them can save you $20,000 on the spot. But I’ve seen that same shortcut turn into an $80,000 fix two years later, once the ground around the pool starts moving and the paving and structure follow it. It is 3 to 5 times more expensive to fix a structural problem than it would have been to build it properly the first time. Every time.
The irrigation shortcuts that cost you plants two summers later
Irrigation is full of a lot of small parts that each do a specific job. They are easy to leave out. A flush valve on the end of each dripper line lets sediment clear out and stops dirt being drawn back into the line when the water is shut off. Each one might cost $10. Leaving one off saves that $10. But it blocks a line within a year or two. A backflow device on the tap, a master solenoid that controls the water flow or solenoids properly housed in a box, all of these can be skipped and none of them will be visible once the system is buried under your garden.
The spacing between the dipper lines matters just as much. These should be properly spaced at 300mm by 300mm so the whole root zone gets even moisture. This is a lot of line in a large garden bed. Space it out further instead, and you can still say the bed has irrigation. What you’ll actually get is plants stretching out looking for water instead of establishing where they’re planted. In big open beds, a spray system is often the better call altogether. Either way, while paperwork says “irrigation installed”, whether it was done properly or not can only be discovered in a couple of years time when all your plants are struggling or parts of your lawn keep dying and you don’t know why.
The hidden reasons you can’t actually compare quotes
I’m sure you’ll understand now how most of the above can stay hidden. And it leads to the heart of the problem. A quote that’s genuinely cheaper because corners are not being cut will read almost exactly like one that is, unless you know what to look for. The site drainage gets left off, or included at a level that isn’t adequate, with no mention of the fact that it’s a minimum allowance. A variation that gets worded so vaguely that extra costs can turn up later. By the time they do, you’re already committed to our landscaping project but your final bill doesn’t bear any resemblance to the original quote. I’ve seen this many time. Two quotes that started at different prices ending up costing the same, or mostly like even more, in the end. The only different being the prediction and transparency because one client knew that beforehand and the other didn’t.
Why the cheap quote always costs you more in the end
In the end, none of this is really about landscaping. It’s about transparency. It’s about the fact that nearly everything that determines whether a garden lasts or not is buried, poured, or planted before you ever get to see the finished result. A cheaper quote can absolutely be a better deal. It can also be the same job with the parts you can’t see quietly removed. The only way to tell the difference is to ask, before anyone picks up a shovel, exactly what’s included and why.
So before you sign anything, ask what’s under the paving, not just what’s on top of it. Ask what strength and thickness the concrete is, and how much steel is going in. Ask whether it’s render or bagging. Ask whether the soil is being conditioned before anything’s planted. Ask whether a permit and engineering are included for decking, retaining walls, and anything near a pool, and if the quotesays they’re not needed, ask why not. Ask what’s actually in the irrigation line, down to the flush valves and the spacing. And ask for a quote specific enough that you could hand it to a second business and get a genuine apples to apples comparison back.
If a landscaper can answer all of that clearly, the number they’ve given you is real. If they can’t, or they wave your questions away, that’s the answer. You’re not being difficult by asking. You’re finding out today what you will otherwise find out in two years times, but at 2-3 times the cost.
Andrew Whyte has spent 35 years designing and building gardens across Melbourne’s bayside and south-east. Whyte Gardens builds every layer of a garden the way it’s meant to be built, seen or not, because the parts nobody sees are the parts that decide whether the garden lasts.
