Day 1069: the grass is always greener

There are two good seasons for installing sod--spring and fall--largely because the temperatures are right, the ground isn't frozen, and Mother Nature usually provides some of the watering. A look at the calendar shows that we opted for fall.

In the background of all our house reno work, we've been trying to whip the outside into shape--cutting down unwanted trees, taking up overgrown bushes and plants, installing new bushes, pruning, weeding, etc. This also included regular work on a yard that had gone a bit to seed/weed. We figured that we'd try for a few years to dethatch, overseed, fertilize, etc. to see if we could increase the grass-to-crud ratio. Here's where we were at the beginning of November, after nearly 3 years of effort:

Suffice to say, we felt as though at best we'd treaded water. So we called in the professionals to turn this:

Into this (as a first step):

The backyard is where the best-laid plans went awry. This was intended as a two-day job that because of some rain got pushed back to Friday (tear up)-Monday (installation). The problem was that even after a weekend of drying out the backyard was still too wet to work properly. The crew used a trick of driving the Bobcat over the ground to drive out the water but even that didn't work.

The fact that the backyard was a swampy mess shouldn't have surprised us because when we get a heavy rain half the yard up to the fence becomes a pond. So the guys gave it another day to dry and added some new topsoil first thing on Tuesday before laying the sod. 

And what a lot of sod it was. Ten-and-a-half pallets of fresh cut rolls to cover our roughly 5000 square feet of lawn. It was a good thing that we'd parked our cars on the street!

One extra day and the extra topsoil, but it was all worth it. The front and left side back to the garage now look like this:

And the back couldn't look better. The guys improved the grade to carry the water from left to right (away from the garage) and back-to-front (away from the fence) to force runoff to run along the right side of the house. We haven't had a soaking rain yet, but we have been doing the required watering and haven't noticed any problems.

If you compare these to the picture at the top of this entry you'll also notice that we tore out the vegetable/flower garden that we inherited from the previous owner but never entirely knew what to do with. So we plowed it under and replaced it with grass for a nice, even lawn.

This closeup of the curb shows how lush the whole yard is. Now it's our job to keep it looking great.