Waterlogged lawn dug out and returfed in Chapelhall, North Lanarkshire

The tenant here is retired and had been living with a back garden that flooded. Every spell of heavy rain left water lying across the lawn, and between the wet spells the grass never properly recovered. He reported it to the council, the council agreed the lawn should be replaced with new turf, and the job was passed to us to carry out.

For the tenant it was an important piece of work. A back garden that floods is not just untidy. It is a garden you cannot use or walk across safely, and for someone who is at home most of the day, it is the view out of the back door. Getting it right mattered more than the size of the job might suggest.

The photographs taken on the first morning show a lawn that had been wet for a long time. The surface was more moss than grass across much of it, with thin, flattened growth and soft ground that took an impression from anything that crossed it. Access chambers sat in the lawn with the ground around them sunk and muddy.

That pattern is typical of a lawn that holds water. Grass roots need air as well as moisture, and in ground that stays saturated they die back near the surface. Moss moves into the gaps because it copes with wet, compacted conditions far better than grass does. Once that happens, feeding and scarifying do very little, because the ground underneath is the problem rather than the grass on top of it.

This is a common picture on estates across North Lanarkshire, where gardens sit on heavy clay subsoil that drains slowly and where the topsoil on top of it is often shallow.

On a lawn in this condition there is no point laying new turf over the old one. The tired, mossy layer and the compacted ground immediately under it were dug out with a mini digger. On a garden of this length, doing the dig-out by machine is far quicker than digging by hand, and it takes the ground down evenly across the whole area.

The mid-job photographs show the garden at that stage: bare soil from the path to the fence, with the old lawn gone. One of them also shows exactly why the work was needed. Along the edge of the slab path, water was lying in the dug ground within hours of it being opened up. That is the ground telling you where the water sits.

With the old surface removed, the ground was graded and raked out to a level, working off a marker peg so the finished lawn would fall evenly rather than leaving the low spots where water had been gathering before. The finished level was kept flush with the path slabs, so the lawn edges meet the paving cleanly and water can run off rather than being held against a lip.

The new turf went down on the prepared ground with the joints staggered like brickwork, so no seam runs straight across the lawn. Each roll was butted tight to its neighbours and cut in neatly along the path, around the rotary drier and against the fence line.

The main lawn was dug out and turfed on the Monday. The smaller strip on the other side of the path was finished on the Wednesday, so the whole of the back garden now has new grass rather than one half looking new beside the other half still waterlogged.

In the finished photographs the turf shows some variation in colour between rolls, and a few joints are still visible. That is normal for turf in its first week or two. It evens out once the roots knit into the ground below and the lawn has had its first couple of cuts.

The tenant now has a level, green lawn from the back door to the boundary, on ground that has been dug out and regraded rather than patched. The slab path is clear and clean on both sides, and the garden is somewhere that can be walked across again.

Laying turf at the end of September is good timing in the west of Scotland. The soil is still warm enough for the roots to establish, and there is enough rain that the new lawn is unlikely to dry out, which is the most common reason new turf fails in a summer install.

All of the old turf and the spoil from the dig-out were taken away, and the paths were cleaned down before we left.