It has taken a while to get this post up.  We initially resodded in the last weekend in February.

We received a few quotes to have our sod professionally done, but they both seemed like too much to pay for what we could do it ourselves for.

After much researching, the venture started on a Friday night, by renting a U-Haul pickup truck and immediately heading over to Home Depot.  At the store, we bought compost, a “bagster” (shown later), a wheel barrow and other miscellaneous things.  The big thing we did was rent a sod cutter, the type seen below, $90 for a 1 day rental.

All of this was done Friday night, for the “fun” to begin on Saturday morning.  Saturday came and at about 7:30am, this was delivered into our driveway..

When we saw those 11 pallets of Floratam St Augistine grass (500 square feet each), it was real to us that we were entering into a MAJOR project.

That morning, M and some friends got going using the sod cutter, which is a beast of a machine, that is not the easiest to use.  While using this, we actually broke a line in the old potable water supply line and had a geyser in the yard!

And the next is after the City came to turn off the water… the aftermath.

After this disaster, the sodcutting and cleanup of old grass and weeds continued, all while our Irrigation guys came over for an emergency appointment to ensure we had drinking water again!

Saturday was completely engulfed in fixing these types of problems, trying to finish with the sod cutter before the rental time was up, and getting all the rentals, including the UHaul back in time.  Quite hectic.

On Sunday, it was all about cleaning up the old grass, and this is what it looked like about midway through in our yard.

Later Sunday afternoon, we finally started laying down some of the sod.  Similar to laying tile, we layed the sod from the far corner of the yard and went towards the front to minimize the amount of traffic that would be put on it.  We laid the sod in a staggered “brick” pattern as everyone recommended and put the pieces as close together as possible and finally running a roller over it to flatten it down.  The hardest part of this was bringing the sod to the backyard in a wheel barrow and cutting any odd pieces.  Some “during” pics are below.

We layed the sod for parts of 3 different days, it was brutal.  All together, the project took 4 days, but at the end of the day, the lawn looks great.  Here are some immediately after pictures.

It looked pretty good in my opinion, and before I show some more recent pictures, here is another  picture of the cleanup.  It shows our “bagster” which is a large Waste Management bag that can take a large amount of waste and cost $30 and an additional $99 or less for pickup.  We filled two of them with yard waste, plus about 50 large yard bags of waste.

These last pics were taken about 3 weeks ago now, and it looks great!

We still have a few more projects to post we are behind of, thanks for coming around!