Building a lawn from scratch

[Traum]

Great work in ripping up the existing lawn! Roughly how long would you say it took you to do the work?

I've just re-seeded and re-soiled all the spotty areas on my lawn on Sat when it was dry. IIRC, there should be some drizzles this week, so I am hoping the rain will take care of the watering for me.

Fingers cross on how that'll turn out...

Good luck with the seeding and grading!

[supafamous]

Originally Posted by Traum

Great work in ripping up the existing lawn! Roughly how long would you say it took you to do the work?

Time wise it wasn't too bad - I think it was probably 10-12 hours of labour to rip it out between my dad and I and then we hired a guy to haul it away for $200 (he claims it ended up weighing about 500kg which seems high).

It took some trial and error to figure out what the best way was to rip it out - as the sod was only 3.5 years old the netting from it was still there in some places so I started with just yanking by hand before progressing to a shovel then a pick axe as the roots got deeper and deeper (making yanking by hand too hard).

[supafamous]

So the good weather meant I could finish the job finally. Tilled the yard to facilitate fixing the soil conditions (lime, lots of fertiliser), dug out a trench to put in a sprinkler system (found a huge rock while doing it too), ordered in 4 yards of top dressing (about 4000-5000lbs) that I had to cart to the back one load at a time and then redistribute and wrapped up yesterday with seed, grub killer, and more fertiliser.

The sprinkler works pretty well though I just barely get to the back left corner (testing didn't show this problem) - my house doesn't flow a lot of water (only 5GPM which is less than the 6GPM that Rainbird says is the minimum) so I'll probably just live with it as is - I otherwise would have to dig up the sprinkler and move it out another foot. I got a timer off Amazon and am watering every 6 hours for now.

Fingers crossed now that we'll have a functioning lawn come summer time.