Yesterday my wife and I re-planted the lawn.

Strictly speaking we over-seeded. The difference between re-plant and re-seed is about whether you decided to throw out all of the old grass, or just add grass.

So here’s what we did:

1. First we raked the lawn completely, both to remove stuff off of the lawn and to dig up the dirt.
2. We levelled the lawn further with a normal rake and this really cool oversized rake.
3. We applied seed (Scott’s High Traffic Tall Fescue)
4. We applied fertilizer (Scott’s Starter Fertilizer)
5. We applied top-soil (Kellog’s Top Soil)
1. Trying to add a layer of top soil on top of the seeds so that the seeds don’t get disturbed was a bit of a challenge. It works best with two people. One person drops the dirt in a pile, the other spreads it out gently using a rake.

The last thing we did got us an 30-40% coverage of the lawn. I am hopeful that this more methodical approach will get me closer to 80-90% of the lawn.

If that fails, the nursery I bought the tools from sells sod at 0.40$ a square foot. The total cost for the sod would be 100$ + some amount for installation. I have not yet given up hope.