This Damn House

We'll see if we can chew it.

One of the sorest points of This Damn House is the lawn yard. I won't bore you with the long and sordid history of this particular piece of earth (except to mention that Jimmy Hoffa is involved), I'll simply tell you that out of the halfish acre of property we own, about 20 square feet is covered with lush rich lawn. For the rest....well, it turns out if you mow weeds, it looks pretty good from a distance.

The one landscaper who would return our calls quoted us about $10,000 (that's "ten thousand dollars", in case you miscounted the zeros) to replace our sorry excuse for a lawn with something more...grasslike.

That's some mighty rich grass, we thinks to ourselves. How hard can this really be? It isn't like you have to have a Master's degree to install a lawn.

So last weekend we rented a Vermeer shredder-chipper from Home Depot, and turned our pile of dead brush (occupying about 72% of our back yard) into a pile of mulch (soon to be occupying 100% of a neatly laid mulch bed around the western edge of the yard).

Next weekend the plan is to hope our soil samples come back quick, rent a tiller, buy some top-soil and "amendments" and turn the yucky "lawn" into vast expanses of brown fecund earth. The following weekend? SOD!

But now I'm reading up on lawn installation (isn't "installation" a weird word to use in gardening? I keep looking around for a blue progress bar) and I'm tortured with self-doubt. We have to grade the lawn? Remove every stick and stone? What if the first frost hits before the sod roots? What if one strip of sod dies and we are left with a brown streak down the middle like a six inch valley through the middle of my soul? What if there's a bump in the lawn, and the new next door neighbors who just teleported in from Privet Drive sue us for lowering their property values?

Who are we to think we can take on a $10,000 ("ten thousand dollars") task in three weekends, anyway?