No tilling - ever, NEVER. Tilling is the fast track to a bumpy surface like you have. If you have an intolerably bumpy surface, start with the existing surface and either grind off the peaks and fill the valleys or just fill the valleys up to the peaks. The easiest material to use is sand because it does not become clods in the middle of the project. Clods are the bane of leveling. You cannot make the surface any leveler than the highest clods. With sand it moves easy to fill and never requires additional sand just to get up to the highest clod. If you are unwilling to water once per week, then there is not much you can do to improve. You could add more clover seed and let Nature take her course. Clover is the type of plant that will survive in poor soil. Your soil is poor because you have neglected to water it regularly. The microbes that normally live in the soil require water and food if you want a healthy soil. Water is water but the food they need comes best in the form of ground up grains like ordinary corn meal, corn gluten meal, soybean meal, alfalfa pellets or meal, cottonseed meal, or a commercial fertilizer called Milorganite. The products provide food in the form of protein, carbohydrates, minerals, vitamins, and enzymes to the microbes. The well fed microbes, in turn, provide plant food to the grass. Sounds odd but this was Mother Nature's design over the past 4 billion years. We just discovered it in the 1990s. We always knew there were a few "germs" in the soil, but we really did not know there were tens of thousands of beneficial microbes in the soil. The advent of dirt cheap DNA testing allowed scientists literally to test dirt for signs of life. The first thing they need is water if you want to improve your yard. The best way to water is deeply like when it rains all day. So water all at once when you water. Spreading out your water over the entire week is what encourages the growth of weeds. Sometimes you can't help when it rains but other times you can restrain yourself from frequent watering. Figure 1 inch, once per week during the hottest heat of summer. In your area you may never get temps above 90 and can go 2 weeks between deep watering. You'll have to judge. So avoid daily watering and move toward deep watering with days in between. You are mowing right...maybe. Mulch mowing is good. You may; however, be mowing too low. For northern grasses start at the highest setting and see if you want to come down a notch or two. But let all the grass get all the way up so the mower is mowing it and then decide. Tall grass develops much deeper roots which require less and less water with the height. Short grass needs a LOT of water. Just to prove that point I have an entire lawn which has not been mowed since Oct 2011. Parts of the lawn are 32 inches tall. Those parts have not been watered since Oct 2011 and look excellent. Now it has rained but I live on the edge of the Texas desert, so we don't get rain very often or very deep. Point is keep your grass as high as you can stand it. It takes less water and keeps more weeds out. If you decide to use a herbicide, use a liquid that you can spot spray individual weeds. A hose end type sprayer will work fine if you have a way to turn it of at the sprayer. Your lawn was likely a mix of fescue and Kentucky bluegrass. Fescue grass grows in clumps so if you want a dense turf, you need lots of seed. KBG spreads and fills in like a carpet so it does not need as much seed. Fescue tolerates some shade. KBG does not tolerate shade. Fescue seed sprouts in 2 weeks. KBG sprouts in 3 weeks. If you decide to seed with a mix of fescue and KBG, be sure to keep up the daily watering for at least 3 weeks to be sure you have some KBG germination. If you decide to reseed, wait until the end of summer to do that. August might be a good time depending on when the heat breaks. You can either wipe out the entire yard with RoundUp or just scalp it down and seed. Watering for new seed requires 3x per day for a very short time. All you need to do is keep the seed moist so it will sprout. If you miss doing it this fall, then wait until next fall. Spring seeding guarantees you a yard full of crabgrass. If you get it right in the fall, then it should be fairly filled in by winter and will come back nice in the spring. If you want to fertilize now, organic fertilizer is what I suggest. It will not burn. Just go to the feed store and find a 50-pound bag of anything I mentioned in the earlier paragraph. I like alfalfa pellets (rabbit chow) for the low low cost of $12.50 per bag. Apply at a rate of 20 pounds per 1,000 square feet. All of them go down at that rate. If you over apply, no worries. You can double that rate and double it again with no worries. These organic feeds work surprisingly well when you are watering properly.

Thank you all again for the compliments, it's been a long time and I wanted to reply to a couple of questions. go_figure, the dimensions of the oven/pantry cabinetry is 16 feet. The range cabinetry is 10 feet. The island is slightly over 7' long by 3' wide. Regarding the red espresso machine, we LOVED that machine and tried to make sure we matched some red items with it. Sadly it died about 18 months ago. We replaced it with a bland silver espresso machine which actually produces much better coffee. We still can't get ourselves to throw away the broken red machine so it sits in our basement knowing it will never get fixed... Thanks again all, and best wishes on all of your remodels!

That's lovely although I can't visualize it in your kitchen. Have you seen this IRL to make sure it's stable? A marble top weighs a lot so this piece could be top heavy, which could make it easier to tip over than a free-standing piece with a lower center of gravity. Also, can you afford to give up the storage your current island provides? You could stash lovely baskets to hold some kitchen items on the bottom shelf but if you overdo it, I'm afraid it will scream "not enough storage space in this kitchen." You can likely achieve the open feel without giving up all your storage by choosing something along these lines gharexpert.com Homes & Gardens Kitchens For Keeps Don't know if the above are more country than you want (although you do have that lovely pine armoire) but hopefully these help you see what else is possible for (fingers crossed) less than $999. Or are you seeing this as a furniture investment that you take with you? If so, then future buyers might see dollar signs, knowing that they'd need to buy an island right off the bat. But before you proceed with any of these ideas, including the marble topped island, make sure that the kitchen floor beneath your current island is finished. If not, you'll have extra costs, especially if it requires that you patch in wood (provided you can still get flooring to match) and/or refinish the whole to avoid the patched look.

I also have an old grape vine. In the Fall I am going to build a better trellis with wood posts and an overhang. This vine sits outside our dining room window and unfortunately looks like a pile of weeds to most people. Originally my plan was to cut the vine way back to just the head and cordons. It looks like the previous owner trained the vine to have upper and lower cordons. Since the first photo there has been some growth, I was hoping to get to trimming before growth started. Should I cut the canes back to the cordons? Should I just let it grow for this season? It really looks like a mess right now.