"Honey, I'm Killing the Lawn. On purpose."

There is definitely a seasonality to seeding a lawn. Thank goodness for that. It allowed me a few weeks to come to terms with what we were doing. My husband's plan was logical. It made total sense. It scared me more than I was willing to admit.

When we'd purchased our home, we had a list of projects in mind to tackle immediately. At the top of R's list was a complete lawn renovation. There was no arguing that the yard was a mess. There were various types of grass, spread unevenly throughout, littered with an astounding number of unwanted weeds. Unfortunately, all of these plants grew at drastically different rates, exacerbating the eye sore that was our grass. We had sought the assistance of professionals too late in the season our first year in the house and couldn't find help. We had consequently attempted a long list of natural remedies to make the yard more presentable. Once tasked with trying to fix it ourselves, I was determined to avoid using chemicals to remedy the problem. But after 3 summers there had been virtually no improvement.

It had only been two weeks of self-isolation, but it was clear that "two weeks to slow the spread", was not about to end any time soon. We were stir crazy. We were in need of a project. We were home. A lot. Why shouldn't we tackle this once and for all? Well, because as R laid out his plan, all I could think of was the possibility that we purposefully killed off our undesirable yawn, and were then unable to grow anything to replace it. In hindsight, it was silly, but I'd been raised by a physician for whom the Hippocratic Oath guided all. First do no harm. It would be an understatement to say I was worried about this plan.

R explained that it made sense to use this opportunity to tackle a few issues outside at once. We had been unsuccessful in convincing the city that, although most of the neighborhood elementary and middle school students funneled past our house on their walk to and from school and we were the only street without a curb, that we needed a sidewalk. They were equally unconcerned about the trucks and cars that regularly made tracks in our yard, since there was no physical barrier, while kids played outside. We were on our own.

R's plan broke down into the following steps:

1. Kill the existing lawn (and ivy)
2. Build a retaining wall
3. Jack hammer out the existing walkway (Replacing this had been at the top of my list when we bought our home)
4. Bring in dirt, regrade the yard, move the gutter exit,  and build smaller garden beds around the trees
5. Seed and then water the new emerging grass
6. Install a new walkway
7. Kick back and enjoy our golf-course-like lawn

I had concerns about killing the grass. I had concerns about growing new grass. I also had concerns about a retaining wall, as I remembered a wall in a very high end neighborhood near where I grew up that was constantly falling apart from the day it was constructed. 30 some years later, you can still drive by today and see large chunks of it crumbling away, despite ongoing repairs. We decided that step 1 was R's personal project, and that I would investigate step 2 and we'd go from there.

Did I say I'd doubted R would be able to kill all of the randomly growing things in the front yard? Silly of me. He pulled it off with speed and precision, confusing more than a few people walking by as he repeatedly mowed our yellowing grass down to nothing. That left me in charge as we headed toward step 2...