Anyone have their lawn replaced?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I live on an average-size suburban lot (I don’t know the actual dimensions), and both my front and back lawns are in terrible condition. The house is about 70 years old, and I’m sure these are the original lawns. There are ruts and depressions, bald spots and areas that have more weeds than grass. So I’m seriously considering having both lawns replaced this summer.

Has anyone had this done? What exactly is involved? Is an herbicide used to kill the old grass/weeds? If so, how does this affect adjacent flower beds? How long does it take? How much does it cost if I don’t do it myself?

2

I’ve never heard of anyone actually starting from scratch (though I’m sure some folks might). My yard is pure crap, too. I’ve heard of people hiring a place to level and fill holes, weed ‘n’ feed to kill the evil weeds, aerate (sp) to get the roots back in shape. Have you talked to ChemLawn or any of the major maintenance companies? I’d think you could get it back in shape, or at least on its way, in a couple years with the help of a landscaper.

Call a couple maintenance companies and have them evaluate and quote. Good luck! I’ll be following this thread, because as I said…mine is pretty damn wild. I’d like to get it leveled out at least.

3

We didn’t replace the whole lawn, but we did redo the strip between our driveway and the neighbor’s property. When the houses were built in the early '50s, the original owners planted ivy in that section that divides the properties. It’s a rectangular slope, maybe 12 feet wide and 30-some feet long. We’re guessing they planted ivy so they wouldn’t have to mow it.

Anyway, we had to kill and rip out all the ivy, which had grown very thick, along with some nasty prickly weeds that had invaded it. I remember my husband spraying it with some nasty herbicide and letting it sit for a day or two. It might have had several applications - it was several years ago. The we went though with the WeedWacker and by hand, pulling up the dead ivy and weeds and roots. The ivy was about 18 inches thick in most places.
Once we got all that up, the dirt was rocky and filled with ruts and holes. My husband went over it with a tiller, many times, to smooth it out, and make it even. I do remember that we had to let it sit for several months (over the winter, IIRC) to let the herbicide dissipate. Then we got some clean fill dirt and filled in the holes and make it ready for sod.

We laid the sod down and it took right away, although I think it still looks patchy in places. We just need to fill it in with grass seed. It’s one of those “We’ll get around to it soon” things.
It’s fun unrolling sod, though!
As for cost, I can’t remember. We did it ourselves, so the main cost would have been the sod.

4

I am preparing to rescue my lawn. I don’t even like lawn work but last year we had a long drought followed by 8 straight days of rain.
I have decided to go with a mixed approach. I just bought a 125 pound capacity broadcast spreader to pull behind my Lawn Tractor. It cost $149.
I plan to buy a mix of Clover & Fescues* especially for the Shady areas.
I have a local Hardware store that has been around for 100 years and plan to take a lot of advise from them. Especially on light chem-free fertilizer use.
The Clover is lower maintenance and better feed for wild deer.
I already have a de-thatcher and sweeper.

Jim

  • Fine and Long Fescues is what I am leaning towards, but the experts at the Hardware store can probably help me more than my on-line research.
5

I replaced about half my back lawn (30 foot section). Got a sod cutter from work and ripped out all the old sod. It cuts the grass from underneath so all you have to do is pick it up. Put black dirt down, tilled it down about 3 inches, and leveled it out with a rake. Placed new sod on top. The sod was around 200 bucks. Can’t remember but I think it’s about 20 cents a foot (it will vary obviously). Water the hell out of it. Took me a several hours by myself.

6

I bought a house last year where the lawn was a mess. The lot had been razed down to dirt to demolish the last home that had been there (except for a few trees), and had never been re-seeded. Weeds covered the entire front and back, and the owners didn’t seem to do anything with them during the 10 to 12 week buying process. When I moved in, there were several patches where the weeds had literally gotten to two feet tall. And to top it off, two days after I took possesion, the city dropped off a warning that the house had been reported for excessive vegetation growth. :rolleyes:

I attacked everything with a weed-whacker to knock down the tall stuff. Then I sprayed the entire yard with Roundup. After giving that time to kill everything off, I went over it with a lawn mower. That at least got things to “mostly dirt with a few leftover patches of mostly dead weeds”.

I hired a landscaping company for the actual installation. They dug up and raked off the remaining weed corpses, put down a rock border along the sidewalk, laid a layer of topsoil, roto-tilled the dirt, delivered and laid the sod. Along with this, I also got a sprinkler system put in (the main reason I decided to contract this out to professionals).

The whole installation took around 3-4 days and cost roughly $10,000, although the sprinkler system was a good chunk of that. I also have a fairly large corner lot (the total yard area is around 7500-8000 square feet). They didn’t have to do any major grading.

I’d assume that your old lawn would get removed by digging it up, not with chemical treatment, so you shouldn’t have to worry about your flowerbeds.

If you want, I can dig up the paperwork to see how the total bill got broken down.

Some tips I can pass along:
[ul]
[li]Find a list of qualified landscapers. I used a local business watchdog group to get a list of high-rated companies. Poll your friends / family / coworkers to see if they had good experiences with someone.[/li][li]Get multiple estimates. I ended up getting four estimates, with prices ranging from $8k (although that turned out to not include the sprinkler system due to a miscommunication) to $15k.[/li][li]See if they have any sort of guarantee on installation (will they replace sections of sod that don’t “take”, etc).[/li][li]I’m not sure if any companies do financing (I paid cash), and they asked for 1/3rd up front, 1/3rd at start of work, and 1/3rd at completion.[/li][li] New sod requires daily watering for a week or two. If you’re in an area with little rainfall, plan for a spike in your water bill.[/li][li] You mentioned doing this in “the summer”. Depending on how hot your location gets, that may not be the best option. From my research (and for where I live), late spring or late summer are the best times to plant new grass, since that lets the grass get settled in before having to deal with summer’s heat.[/li][/ul]

Hope that offers some help.

7

I can’t really help on the cost of having someone else do it.

However, I’ve just recently undertaken the task of trying to regenerate my own lawn (the previous owners didn’t take good care of it) and it really isn’t all that bad if you want to do it yourself. Of course, I live in a relatively easy area to grow a lawn, so it might be much different for you.

As others have said, the best approach is to kill the old lawn, let it sit, then plant the new one or just buy some sod. Plan on at least a year to kill off the old lawn, though. You’ll probably need at least a couple of different herbicides to do it effectively. And don’t plant in the summer. Fall or early Spring are the best times to plant. On my present house I just used a dethatcher, spread some lime, overseeded and then covered that in peat moss. We get daily showers so I don’t even have to water! We’ll see how well it worked in about 3 weeks or so. Total cost was under $200 for the equipment, lime, seed, peat moss and fertilizer.

At my old house replacing about 1200 sq feet of lawn with sod took about 3 or 4 very full days of work. Rolling out the new sod was the easy part. The tough part was getting the old stuff out, tilling it, grading it and then rolling it. Total cost was about $500 but it looked AMAZING when it was done.

The absolute hardest part is the grading. Being done grading is usually determined by how tired you are…