jk96, To put things into perspective the football field was a good example. A typical football playing field is 1.4 acres. And if you want the lawn portion to look that good requires a well trained full time staff of pros. Another thing to note is they donÂt use tractors, they use very specialized mowing equipment like golf courses do. Not too mention the expense of a lot of water and fertilizers. Mr. Hall also pointed out the beauty of the museum again that takes a large staff of gardeners and grounds keepers, which means a large expense. I am a sod farmer, rancher, own a landscape company my family operates, and have a large lawn myself. However I cannot tell you how to lay your grounds out as it is beyond my capabilities. So do what I would do if I were in your shoes, hire a designer. What I can tell you is it is going to be very expensive to construct, and even more expensive to maintain. What it boils down to is you are going to have to have a very brisk biz to break even if my assumptions are correct on what you want to create. So do some homework and really think about the scale of 4+ acres and the cost. Good luck to you. TW

Might want to try the landscape design forum on this site. I think some of the folks over there are using some of these programs.

Tiemco - Isn't the first one he linked a cylindrical oscillating sprinkler? I own a bunch of Gilmour impact sprinklers (the heavy duty kind), the pattern master which OP linked to, an oscillating sprinkler as well as the quick-snap, in-ground sprinklers (http://www.quick-snap.com/). When I was testing them out on newly seeded soil, I found that the impact sprinklers produced large drops of water that also fell on the soil with a lot of lateral momentum and easily washed off seed from the top of the soil. The pattern master is also similar. Not to say you won't have any success with them but perhaps topdressing with petemoss or some mulch would be a good idea if using an impact sprinkler. Oscillating sprinklers I think are fairly good as the water falls down gently. However, the one I have is not a very large area coverage sprinkler so it is quite uniform. Not sure about the uniformity with the OPs 1st link. Ultimately, I settled for the quick-snap sprinklers. What I really like about them is that you get essentially the same performance as a professional install if you place them in the right locations. The spray from these sprinklers are much more uniform while also being gentler on the soil/seed. I wrote about them in detail in another post which I will copy-paste below: I purchased 5 quick connect underground sprinklers a few months back and have been exceptionally happy with them. I would highly recommend that you follow the advice in this review: Amazon Review It works out cheaper to just order the U shaped joints from the quicksnap website: QuickSnap Store - Parts And to buy the recommended K2 smartset sprinklers from HomeDepot. The recommended sprinklers in that review are superior to the default sprinkler that comes with the package as you can easily set both left and right stops without having to remove the sprinkler from the ground. This is really really handy and makes installation a breeze and gives you the flexibility to adjust spray coverage of the sprinklers when renovating sections of your lawn. The other reason I really like this product over the other ones is that it uses off-the-shelf sprinklers so you are not locked into any specific brand of overpriced sprinklers. More importantly, if you are renovating and planting seed on bare soil, these pop-up sprinklers have a much finer spray which does a great job of providing water to the seed without washing them away. Some of the other products have much coarser drops which aren't all that great for watering newly seeded beds. I am actually just in the process of renovating a 3000sq ft section of my backyard and I don't think I would have had remotely decent results without the help of these sprinklers. I still have to manually move the hose about from one sprinkler to the other, but with the aid of a digital timer and the quick-snap hose connectors, it really isn't that big a deal. Here is a picture of my quick-snap sprinkler in action in week 2 of my renovation: This post was edited by HamsterHuey on Fri, Aug 30, 13 at 8:35

Some of our changes were things that just weren't really specified before hand, or underspecified. For example, we didn't know that the standard way to do an open staircase around here was to have a mini wall in the middle. We wanted it completely open, so we paid a little more to have them re-engineer and build the staircase the way we wanted it. Plumbing and electrical went up a little bit (not based on selections), but not by a lot. Most however, were things that we decided to do differently once we were actually able to see choices in person, do more research, etc. One major thing we decided to do was go with LP siding, rather than vinyl. Also, turns out the cost for trim can go up by nearly a factor of 10 when you decide to do a 2 piece, wide poplar casing and thick baseboards. instead of mdf. That was really surprising to us. Just flat poplar instead of mdf would have been a difference of around $5k. We didn't even do any crown molding or anything, and nearly doubled what we had budgeted for trim work (we had budgeted for flat poplar). We really thought about the way we live and the layout of our house before we signed our contract, so we didn't make any real changes to the structure. We didn't really run into any complicated lot issues (other than city fee), so that was nice. Before signing our contract with our builder we did go meet with a bunch of his contractors to make tentative selections that we could base the contract price on. However, I have to say, we're surprised by how much our tastes changed from our first meetings with people to now (just a matter of days 'til we move in). One thing that became really important to us, which we didn't really realize when we started, was to add as many historic elements as we could afford in order to recreate the charm and character that we love about older homes. Since you really can't get authentic looking details without a lot more labor (and usually more expensive materials), that really drove the cost up on some items. Our carpenters probably love and hate me. Thinking about it now, most of that extra expense has gone to our various carpenters (that's totally ok with me, because they're awesome). I do think you should have a little extra room in your budget that will allow you to be flexible with your style and choices as you go through the project. You probably won't make such extreme deviations from your original design concept, but I can all but guarantee things will come up that you'll want to do differently. Adding architectural details usually worth the extra money in my book, but it might not be to you. Still, if you can, I think leaving some room for things you don't really need, but come to love, is something you should definitely do. Sorry for the long-winded response, but hopefully it's helpful.