For that size you might want to hire a guy with a tractor and box blade to resurface the entire area. With no obstructions he can easily do that in a morning. That will leave all the surface looking the same. Leave it up to him whether to bring in more soil or have some removed. Why? He will determine the way your garden drains. He might need to build up or haul away for best drainage. You might find such a person working as a landscaper. Find someone who specializes in large project, not necessarily homes. If you have any new apartment buildings or new subdivisions going in, ask the superintendent who he's using to do the "Finish grading." He'll be the one who repairs all the damage done by the construction. After that you won't need another machine. All you need is seed, a roller, and a hose to water it. By far the best time of year to renovate is in the fall. Now is a poor time time and getting worse all the time with the approach of summer. New grass has a hard time making it through the summer heat. For you in Central PA I would start this project in August. Ideally you'll have new grass by the end of Sept and be on your way. Until then you should be able to live with the "mixed" lawn you'll eventually have. Might be a lot of crabgrass, but who cares. You'll reap the big reward after it's done right and seeded with good seed in the fall.

Welcome to being the latest of the Lawn Whackos. You're in great company...with the rest of all of us here. You're not clueless, you're just starting out. As you learn, this will change. $150 for 500 square feet works out to $0.30 a square foot. For that, I'd come up there and install it for you. :-) All you need is a good rake, several hours, and seed. Kill off the crabgrass (this may take several tries with Roundup as that stuff seems to be able to survive nuclear war). Once dead, rake the whole area clear and get the soil scratched up well. Perfectly-workable-case, get any good seed mix off the shelf. Best-case, listen to Bestlawn or others for suggestions. Seed. Reverse your rake and lightly cover the seed. Water two to four times daily for short periods. There you go, lawn, in one to four weeks, depending. The same kind you'd've gotten from TruGreen. Cost...about $8 for the seed if you buy way too much for overseeding purposes. $20 for the rake. And you get to keep the rake. You'll get weeds, that's assured. You would have with their seeding as well. REALLY horrible section between the sidewalk and the road of which maybe ten feet by thirty feet needs to be re-done. That's called a hell strip because it's just hell on lawns. :-) That area frequently requires some help, extra water through the year, and reseeding. It just doesn't flourish too well under most conditions. Once all this works, we'll be glad to wean you off TruGreen and get you a much nicer lawn. :-)

There are a few things you need to learn, a few you need to unlearn, and you need to learn to not listen to your neighbors about how they do their lawn care. I'm not saying I'm the only source of good information or that my information is ever the best, but there is waaaay more bad information going around than good. Stop reading your newspaper for information. From what I've read, that is the worst. Or if you read it, then just do the opposite of what it says. Seriously! When you read through everything I'm about to give you it might seem complicated. It isn't. Basic lawn care is all you need. The parts that seem complicated pertain to the issues which you may someday face. More likely you'll just hear about them from your neighbors and they'll scare you into running out and buying products you never needed. Just chill. St Aug is easy to excel at if you are patient. Patience is one of the things you should learn with any lawn. Not everything happens immediately. For example with St Augustine there is only one herbicide you can use with success, so you may as well get some now. You have weeds that will die out...eventually...with this stuff. Look for herbicide sprays with atrazine. Atrazine is known to be bad stuff, so you are limited to using it only once per year. Fortunately it works so well you might only need to use it once ever. It kills existing weeds and their seeds leaving just about nothing except the St Augustine. Here is one brand that works. Read the entire label before you use it. Note that when you spray, you walk backwards so that you don't get ANY of it on you. Don't use it if your wife is pregnant. It is bad stuff, but absolute hell on weeds. Also you should be aware that it takes seemingly forever to work. You can spray it and it will look the same for weeks. Then, all of a sudden, all the weeds are gone and there's nothing but St Aug left. The main thing that kills St Augustine is drying out. If it goes with absolutely no moisture for a month with temps above 90 degrees F, it is likely to die. It does not have a dormant stage. The second thing that kills St Augustine is fungal disease, but DO NOT RUN OUT AND BUY A FUNGICIDE. Please keep reading. Lastly the thing that kills St Aug is chinch bugs and sometimes grubs. Again, do not run out and buy an insecticide. Here are the basics for lawn care. These are only slightly customized for you in South Florida. 1. Watering Water deeply and infrequently. Note that you still have lawn remnants after a year with no watering and no care. Clearly (CLEARLY) you do NOT have to water the lawn every day like your neighbors are doing and like your sprinkler people insist and like your newspaper people are advising. When you water you should water deeply. Deeply means a full inch all at one time. In your sand 1 inch will soak right in instantly. We will work on retaining the moisture, but for now this is enough to know. When do you water? Basically when the grass tells you to. It will wilt. If you ever see any part of it wilting after several days with no moisture, water the entire lawn deeply. I like to use an oscillator sprinkler. It takes about 8 hours to water one zone with that sprinkler, so it's watering very slowly to get a full inch. But the oscillator applies the most even spread of water of all the sprinklers. Generally, when the temps are in the 90s every day and low humidity (not necessarily your area), you should water once a week. With higher humidity and/or lower temperatures in the 80s, you should water every 2 weeks. Again, watch your grass for signs of wilting and adjust based on those signs. I have a lawn on the edge of the South Texas desert. This year we had occasional soaking rains such that I did not turn on the hose until mid July. Clearly your lawn does not need to be watered every day. Watering deep and infrequently will practically eliminate all weeds without doing anything else. Why? Because weed seeds need continual moisture to germinate. When the soil dries out and remains dry at the surface for days or weeks, weed seeds can't get started. 2. Mowing Always mulch mow St Aug at the highest setting. There is never any reason to mow it at any lower setting than the highest. You can just weld your mower at the highest spot. At my desert lawn I keep it at from 9 to 12 inches tall using only a string trimmer. It looks great at that height, but it's no good for kids to play in. 3. Fertilizer The general advice you see for grass is to fertilizer once in the late spring and twice in the fall. Since you do not have a winter, you can do it differently. I will suggest you follow the federal holiday schedule so you don't forget. I start on Washington's Birthday, then Memorial Day, Labor Day, and Thanksgiving. If you want to use organic fertilizer, which I very strongly recommend, then also apply on 4th of July. 4. Air movement This is special for St Augustine. St Aug needs to have air circulation at all times. If you, for example, toss some palm fronds on the lawn and leave them overnight, in the morning the grass underneath will already have a fungal disease starting. It's just that fast. My wife seems to do this to me every year, so I have to treat it (organically). If you have or get Floratam, it will fight back from that disease process without doing anything. It's pretty amazing grass. If you don't have Floratam yet and you put one piece down, eventually you will have all Floratam because the rest will have died from one disease or another and the Floratam will have moved in. That's what is happening in my back yard in San Antonio. I put down one piece in 2011 and it took off covering the bermuda and everything but the most tenacious weeds. That's really all there is to lawn care for St Aug. Water, mow, and fertilize. You should never need to aerate or dethatch. Once your lawn becomes dense and you are not watering it multiple times per week, then it should never need weed control. If you can keep Mother Nature from keeping the grass too wet, you should never see fungal problems. Organics Organic gardening has a reputation for costing too much, smelling bad, and sometimes killing the lawn. That was old school organic and really old school organics. The modern approach to organic lawn care is really easy, effective, and inexpensive. Nowadays we are using ground up grains like corn, soybean, cottonseed, alfalfa, and even used coffee beans. What these give to the lawn is food value - quite literally. When you apply food to the soil, the microbes in the soil "digest" the food and turn it into plant food. Mother Nature has been doing this for literally billions of years. We only learned this about the soil in the 1990s. Now that we know this, it has revamped organic gardening completely. You can go to your local feed store and buy a 50-pound bag of corn meal or alfalfa pellets (rabbit chow), apply at a rate of 20 pounds per 1,000 square feet, and get incredible results. Really? (I can see you're skeptical) Here's another picture. This picture was taken by mrmumbles and posted here at GW back in 2011. He applied alfalfa pellets to the green spot in mid May and took the picture in mid June. You can see the improved color, density, and growth. So yes, it is very effective. Furthermore, you have sand and likely with little organic matter in the soil. The best way to put organic matter in the soil is to grow grass in it. Grass sheds about 1/3 of the root system every year. That 1/3 of the dead roots becomes organic matter in the soil and food for the microbes living there. When you water deeply as mentioned earlier, the roots will grow deeper and, when they die, they will provide organic matter deeper in the soil. It is this type of organic matter that will retain moisture in your soil/sand and allow you to go longer and longer between watering. Super deep roots is how I can go until July without watering in the desert. Organic herbicide There really isn't one. Vinegar spray on the foliage will kill most plants, but that includes St Augustine. Organic fungicide Corn meal at 20 pounds per 1,000 square feet is the only one we know of. For me it has worked every year since 2002. In fact if it wasn't for corn meal saving my lawn from annual disease, I would likely not be organic today. Organic insecticide There are three worth mentioning. One is called beneficial nematodes. These are not the root knot nematodes you might hear about in FL. These carry a disease that attacks only insects. Apply beneficial nematodes to wet soil and they will find insect hosts and infect them. The insects stop feeding immediately and that's that. Chief among the insects you should care about are chinch bugs and grubs. They are summer time pests, so you don't have to do anything now. The second organic insect killer is called BT Worm Killer. BT is a similar disease but it works on all caterpillars (only). If you get sod webworm, use BT. A lifetime supply of the stuff costs about $10 and has a 25 year shelf life after you open it. The third is called spinosad. Spinosad is also an insect disease. It is less selective and has been named as a possible problem for the loss of bees in the country. I use it only in granular form on fire ants. There are other insect killers that I do not use. I do not use them because I believe they are dangerous just like nicotine and hemlock are dangerous organic materials. Again, you only need to really care about numbers 1-4 above. Water, mow, feed, and keep the junk off the grass. St Augustine will send runners out into the yard to spread. It sends them out when the temps are in the 70s and 80s. Either side of that window and it stops spreading. Also St Aug has considerable shade tolerance. I would be thrilled to have 5 hours of sun on any part of my lawn in San Antonio. The sunniest area in my back is so dense I can only mow about a 6-inch swath at a time. This is not the 12-inch high grass. My wife wants this mowed like a real lawn, not an experimental test station.

do your neighbors have subsurface drip irrigation systems? Apparently, with SDI, if you do rototill in amendments, make sure to re-compact the soil nice and firm afterwards. If the soil is too loose and well draining, the SDI system might not work very well. Check out this link, about a third of the way down the page: http://www.jstryker.com/goofing/houselandscape/index.htm quote: "subsurface system on the lawn has been a disappointment. My lawn has had numerous dry spots that developed shortly after the sod was installed, and I have been unable to eliminate them by adjusting the water run times... I had used a similar product on commercial systems several years ago with success, so the problem is specific to my situation. It appears the problem is due to a combination of porous soil and insufficient soil compaction. The idea of the subsurface drip is that the water comes out of the emitters (holes) on the tubes and then it moves through the soil, by capillary action, up and sideways to wet the entire area. However the soil in my yard is very porous and was dug up to remove roots, so it was very loose. As previously noted we rototilled the soil to remix it and put a lot of organic amendments into it. After we aerated the soil we then compacted it to industry standards using a water-filled roller. We then installed the sod and compacted it again using the weighted roller. Unfortunately, while this is the normal procedure for installation of a new lawn, this apparently was not sufficient on our very porous soil to create enough contact between the soil particles to allow the water to move by capillary action.... ....the water is going straight down in the soil and only wetting the area directly below the tubes. I believe this is because the soil needs to be compacted a lot more firmly when using the subsurface system than occurs when using the standard weighted roller compaction method I used.... The lesson learned is that the subsurface drip system does not work well in porous, well-draining soils, and if it is to be used in a well drained soil it is important to over-compact the soil.... ....If your soil is less porous, then the subsurface drip system can work well. I have used it successfully on lawns in several locations, but in all those cases the soil was compacted using heavy tractor mounted compaction equipment."