replacing flower bed with grass

sonomagirl02

Hello! I need help from people with green thumbs because mine are not.    The previous owners of our house put in gardens right before we moved in.  I know this because the plants were all nice and very neat and clean looking.  We moved in in October.  By summer the next year, even with me out there every single day weeding, trimming, etc, the ground covers they planted (that didn't look like ground cover the fall before) were all over everything and weeds were abundant (they didn't use landscape fabric).  Fast foward to 4 years and 1 baby later, it's bad.

I've successfully erradicated the ground cover from the lawn, but one of the flower beds just isn't going to make it.  I found out it's called Bishop's Weed (I'm 99% sure).  It's horrible.  So between work, school and a 1 year old, I can't go out there everyday to try to weed and pull the ground cover up.  So I want to remove the flower bed and put grass in.  It's right next to a walkway that runs by our deck and we would like to expand the walk way a little too, so that's another reason we're taking it out.  It's an area of about 5'x20-30'.  So it's going to be a lot of work to take it out.  My husband would like to save some of the bulbs that are in the garden now and transplant them if we can.  I'm afraid the only thing I can do is just start digging and sorting the weeds from plants we'd like to keep.  Any suggestions? I am curious what is the best way to do it?

~NB~

My suggestion would be to widen the walkways and then plant a diversity of shrubs and perennials in the beds, not grass. And landscape fabric shouldn't be used around plants.