# Contrails Mess... (lawn/yard/property journal)



## Contrails (Aug 23, 2020)

Hola fellow lawn nuts. When my wife and I were dating many years ago, we took a day trip to Port Townsend (a small fishing touristy town on the Olympic Peninsula) and visited a book shop. You know, one of those little tourist trap ones where they sell you crap that's way overpriced and your kids will break on the way home anyway. Well, I left that magical shop with a book about lawn strips, and there was probably the genesis of an obsession. Despite my love for stripes, I never really had the time or motivation to pursue them.

Fast forward to today, and we're on our second home (that we built) on 1.2 acres on the wet side of Washington (just South of Seattle). We built the original house in 2016, and a detached garge/mother in law last year. This year we paved the main road leading up to the house, and am still working on putting in stone fireplace/patio area (we're going on almost six months now of work and I'm burnt out on it).

Right now the lawn is a northwest blend that was hydro seeded last summer when we completed the detached garage/mother in law. When we put the lawn in, we did a rough grade with a mini-excavator and basically left it. Fast forward over a super wet winter and followed by an extremely dry summer, my yard is a mess. There are holes, tracks leftover from dump trucks, dog pee burn spots (we have a female Great Dane and male Lab), weeds, sticks, pinecones, and rocks galore. Not to mention that my two-year-old has his own quarry and he needs to take loads with his dump truck all over the yard.

I'm going to have some challenges.

Final goal in a perfect life would be:

install irrigation
level, level, level, and some more level
curbing
convert to either Rye or Bluegrass (not sure which yet)
not directly related to the yard, but we need to fence the property (~900' of fencing)

I tried a couple times to use the google/drone method to determine my square footage, but I keep getting different estimates. I'm probably going to need to measure by hand, but the lawn area is somewhere between 17,000-20,000 square feet. Throw in a couple hundred square feet of flower bed as well.

Here are some pictures of the property in the mean time.


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## ken-n-nancy (Jul 25, 2017)

Contrails said:


> ... my two-year-old has his own quarry and he needs to take loads with his dump truck all over the yard.


Just had to say that's awesome!

Welcome to The Lawn Forum. Congratulations on your new home! Sounds like you're making it a great place for your extended family!



Contrails said:


> I tried a couple times to use the google/drone method to determine my square footage, but I keep getting different estimates.


Online satellite-photo based measuring tools, like the one at https://www.measuremylawn.com are actually very accurate. The problem is often that it is hard to find the boundaries of the lawn in a satellite photo of a lawn in the woods. However, if you can figure out where the boundaries of the lawn are, they work very well.

You'll find lots of tips on the other items you mention -- irrigation, leveling, curbing, renovation, etc. on various threads on the site. Welcome!


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