Oh My Sod

When Amy and I bought our first place back in 2005, we knew it had awesome potential, but that it was majorly outdated. The picture on the right shows what it looked like sometime in 2007. Over the years, we’ve replaced all the builder-grade 70s fixtures, removed wallpaper, scraped popcorn, painted (inside and out), installed tile, renovated a kitchen, hung fans and knocked down a wall.

The one flaw of our house that we hadn’t remedied was the landscaping. We did what we could by removing unwanted trees, digging up rotten railroad ties and transplanting the sporadically planted Azalea bushes into defined planter areas. A couple weekends ago we also had 22 tons of fill dirt dumped in front of our house and rented a skid-steer, thank fully the skid steer rental prices were decent so were also able to get a harley rake attachment to level out our lumpy, terraced property. One thing remained the same though; it still wasn’t a “yard”.

That finally changed last weekend when we rolled out 8,000 square feet (16 pallets) of Centipede grass. Of all the projects we’ve done here, laying that much sod was by far the most physically exhausting. Between running the tiller, raking the soil, moving loads of sod, laying out the rolls, cutting the edge pieces with a machette and pushing a 250lb water-filled roller over it when we were done, there were no easy tasks associated with this project. If it weren’t for our friends Levi, Greg and Jay who helped us do the bulk of the work on Saturday, we would have never finished. In fact, I just finished rolling out the last piece of sod while wearing a headlamp at 8pm tonight.

As has been the case with several of our DIY projects, we didn’t know exactly what we were getting ourselves into. Our plans hit a few snags: the rain last week washed away all the soil we loosened over the prior weekend, we over-estimated a little on the amount of sod we needed and under-estimated how much time it would take. The results though, are amazing. We now have a beautiful, intentional-looking yard that perfectly compliments our house.

View more pictures of our newly sodded yard.