You cannot blame your neighbor for your crabgrass. Crabgrass seed is everywhere, but it only germinates when the environment is right. It was your management that allowed the crabgrass to get started. Every now and then we will get a note here thanking us for the watering and mowing advice which put a dead stop to the neighbor's encroaching crabgrass. If you are doing it right, crabgrass will grow right up to the edge of your lawn and stop. It will stop because your soil is too dry for seed to germinate and because your grass is too dense for the crabgrass to get any light. First of all you need a dense canopy of grass. If you have fescue turf, you should overseed every fall until it is as dense as necessary to keep the crabgrass out. If the Pennington bag has Kentucky bluegrass in it, then the turf can become dense without annual overseeding. Secondly, only seed northern grasses in the fall. Why? Because crabgrass seed only germinates in the spring. If you seed grass in the spring, you will germinate all the crabgrass seed in the process. Also if you seed grass in the spring the summer heat will kill it. Third, do not mow at your mower's lowest setting. If your grass is dense you can mow at the 3-inch level. If it is less dense, then you might raise it up to the mower's highest setting until the grass becomes more dense. That might take years of overseeding if you have only fescue and no Kentucky bluegrass. Fourth, don't fertilize in the early spring. Wait until after the fast flush of spring growth is over. Memorial Day is a good day to shoot for. Once your lawn is established, the watering mantra is deep and infrequent. Deep means one inch all at one time. Infrequent means monthly watering in the cool months and gradually increasing the frequency to weekly in the hottest heat of summer. By allowing the soil surface to dry out completely between watering, the weed seeds cannot germinate. They need to have continual watering to do that. You might have neighbors who water daily for a few minutes. That is exactly wrong for too many reasons to go in to. After you have a few months of deep and infrequent going on, then you can adjust the amount you put down for your situation. Variables include shade, sun, clouds, wind, humidity, soil type and condition, grass type, mowing height, and probably some that don't come to mind right now. You need to measure the output of your sprinklers using a cat food or tuna can. Time how long it takes to fill a few of those cans placed around the yard. My system takes 8 full hour to fill a can but my neighbor's takes only 20 minutes. Every system is different. Another example of different is my house in San Antonio is under a dense canopy of oak trees. With my grass, mowing height, and soil, I can normally water for 3 hours per week in the summer (3/8 inch) but sometimes I have to go to 5 hours. During our driest years I will have to water for 7 hours per week to keep the grass from wilting before the week is up.

We have grandfather laws in this country so while new places must conform with new laws, older places do not have to update unless something major is changed. As a farmer we had this in my county. The local lake was polluted and they said farmers were to blame No way. Here only 10% of land is field so we could not farm hard enough to pollute the lake that bad. So we hired divers and they traced septic lines back to houses on the lake. In the 1920,s these were camps, not houses, but over time people converted camps to year a round houses and just kept the old wastelines as proper septic systems would be expensive. After 10 houses the Maine Dept Environmental Protection told us to get the divers out and that it was farmers doing the polluting. It was just too big of a problem to tackle as no one has any money to put in septic systems everywhere and they know it. I would not think a washing machine would be an expensive fix however.

Agree with gardengal. You already have deep soil. If you put soil on top of a concrete pad, then you would need the 6-8 inches on top of that. You already have soil, so don't bring in any new. Thanks for giving your location. That tells us that gardengal's advice for the Pacific Northwest location is going to work best for you. If you don't mind using Round Up, that will kill the weeds for you. The way to do that is to water the entire yard for a few minutes, three times every day for a week. This will bring up a lot of new weeds. After a week of watering, spray the yard with Round Up. Continue watering for another week and spray Round Up again. This approach should kill all the weeds that would have sprouted when you seed or sod the yard. After that let the soil dry for a couple days and make sure it is level. You want water to drain away from all the buildings and not pool up anywhere. That might require more topsoil. Once you have it level, then bring in the sod. Sodding is not hard, especially if you can recruit some of your friends, who likely are not working either. Of course they have to stay away from each other, so only 1 or 2 others should be recruited. Pay them in pizza and beer. Gardengal and I disagree on rototilling. I would suggest you NEVER rototill and not for the reason you found. My reasoning is that tilling destroys the soil structure, and it takes a long time to reestablish it. She's likely to come back and comment on my approach. Listen to her!

It's recommended to put down a spring fertilizer with weed control in the spring. Apply it when forsythia start blooming for optimal results. It won't hurt your lawn. Assuming you follow directions. Whether or not to fertilize is up to you. I mulch my clippings and if I didn't supplement with fertilizer, my lawn would look bad. If I just spent a lot on sod, I would fertilize. Lawns don't naturally occur anywhere in nature. You have to do unnatural things, like apply fertilizer, to keep them looking good. What some might consider looking good would never appear in a scotts ad.