Gardening & Landscaping
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Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Our yard is 90% weeds, 10% grass.
We bought the house as a short sale that had sat empty for over a year. Before that, the owner bought it as a foreclosure.
The house was built in 1998, and it looks like the last time anyone put any time or effort into the landscaping was 1999. 
We are trying to figure out our options. Is there a way to kill all of the weeds and plant some grass? Or is there a way we can get rid of all the weeds and lay sod down?
And actually, right now about 75% of our front yard is dirt because we just had sewer and water pipework done, so we're thinking now is a great time to figure out the lawn sitation.
Anyone do anything similar? It's going to end up being an extreme overhaul. 
Any advice, or cost estimates or related stories would be great.
Re: Our yard is 90% weeds, 10% grass.
You might want to consider having a landscaping company come out and scrape the sod of weed up and lay in new sod or seed. Cost depends on size of yard. Get multiple itemized quotes from reputable companies and ask that they all give you one that is a "not to exceed" price.
Knowing what I do about you, this would be DIY, right?
If it were me, I'd lay sod in the front yard in the early fall. Your backyard would depend on size and budget. Now? Next year? Seed vs. sod...
*waves* nice to see a local over here.
Possibly DIY if I can learn enough about it. H wants to hire it out. I'm just trying to see what our options are.
And after reading these responses, I don't really want to learn anything about it. Haha. We'll probably get some landscaping companies out to give us some quotes. That's going to be so hard for me since I'm so cheap.
Well, if you want to work within a budget (or if you're like me and you hate spending $ on big home projects), you could kill out the entire area you want redone. I'm in southern Ohio and the best time of year for lawn renovation is early fall. So, you would want to kill out the grass in the beginning of August, using Roundup or something like that. You wait until early September and you would rent a seed slicer to put your seed in the ground...then water it consistently and you should be good to go. Around here they recommend using a tall fescue type grass...not sure what they would recommend in your area.
It is a little more labor intensive than hiring out, but it would definitely be cheaper!
We had the same problem in our backyard and had 3 companies come give us quotes for sodding it. Most quotes came in around $1500 but we have a small yard (sorry not sure on the square footage). The company we went with proposed to do it without chemicals. They used a sod cutter to cut off the top 4 inches of our yard, then they tilled the dirt and laid the sod. Took less than a day, instant gratification!
that was back in April and we've been very pleased. The only weeds that returned are the nut grass, and their root system is down about a foot so there was no way to remove that without going that deep. We just pull it as we see it, as we don't want to use chemicals on our lawn because of the dogs.
Gretchen Evie, born 7/8/2012 at 35w5d
After discussing with H, I think this is the plan.
After we install our underground sprinkler system, of course. Ugh! 