Laying timber sleepers as garden border - DPC?
Discussion
My wife has said that she'd like to raise one of the garden borders by the use of sleepers (200mm x 100mm). I've ordered the sleepers but need to get my head around how best to install them.
I'll dig a foundation trench to make sure it is level, but my query is how best to proceed from here. A foundation of concrete? If so wet or dry mix? Or no concrete just sand or just gravel? A damp proof course of visqueen or will this just trap moisture?
The internet is full of varying methods, but as always it's good to hear advice from people who know what they're talking about rather than trying to sell you something.
I'll dig a foundation trench to make sure it is level, but my query is how best to proceed from here. A foundation of concrete? If so wet or dry mix? Or no concrete just sand or just gravel? A damp proof course of visqueen or will this just trap moisture?
The internet is full of varying methods, but as always it's good to hear advice from people who know what they're talking about rather than trying to sell you something.
Thanks for the advice about how to do this, we (my wife and I, as we couldn't persuade the children to help) spent the weekend installing the sleepers.
We dug a shallow trench, put in a couple of inches of a combination of gravel and crushed brick and stone rubble and sat the sleepers straight on it.
They had a coat of wood preserver before they went down, and the cut ends had a good soaking in it. I used galvanised unistrut / channel fittings to join the pieces together as below:
https://www.cef.co.uk/catalogue/products/71703-4-h...
These tees were ideal to hold the intersection of three sleepers together, with some 70mm coach bolts. We'll staple some dpc or visqueen on the back faces of the sleepers before we fill it with soil next weekend.
The hardest part was smashing up the rubble to make aggregate, I could have bought it but it seemed like a good idea to use some of the debris we had laying around from the ongoing house extension.
We dug a shallow trench, put in a couple of inches of a combination of gravel and crushed brick and stone rubble and sat the sleepers straight on it.
They had a coat of wood preserver before they went down, and the cut ends had a good soaking in it. I used galvanised unistrut / channel fittings to join the pieces together as below:
https://www.cef.co.uk/catalogue/products/71703-4-h...
These tees were ideal to hold the intersection of three sleepers together, with some 70mm coach bolts. We'll staple some dpc or visqueen on the back faces of the sleepers before we fill it with soil next weekend.
The hardest part was smashing up the rubble to make aggregate, I could have bought it but it seemed like a good idea to use some of the debris we had laying around from the ongoing house extension.
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