I'm not 100% clear on the post above about buying from big box stores. If the meaning was that the cheaper mowers from there are just not going to last 25 years, then yes but saying that buying a Honda mower from HD is of any lesser quality than buying from a lawn care shop just simply isn't true. There are benefits to both. At places like Home Depot, you will usually save about $100. Thats where the benefits stop with them. At the local lawn stores you will probably pay a bit more but the benefits are usually worth the extra cash. They will assemble the machine for you, adjust the cables/etc, fill it with fluids and normally go over the operation of the new mower as well. Your choice. Depending on your budget there are many mowers you can choose from. IMO, the best home/commercial (in instances where its not being treated poorly and is maintained properly) mower that offers the best cut and ease of use is the Honda HRX line. They offer a key actuated electric start on the top of th line but with how easy my mower is to start, seems like a $100 option thats not necessary. I honestly barely have to pull the cord, maybe 10% effort max to get it to start right up. They also have a feature I find amazing the blade brake or what Honda calls "roto stop". This allows you to keep the engine running without having to have your hands on the handle as when the lever is released, the blades stop spinning. I'm sure this aids in the ease of starting too. I recently acquired a HRX217HXA (slightly older model and has been updated with the HRX217HYA) that is 4 years old. I actually drove about 5.5h one way to pick it up in Indiana! Link to the HRX line on Hondas site. http://powerequipment.honda.com/lawn-mowers/hrx-series-lawn-mowers If the HRX line is too pricy then I would suggest the HRR line. The lower two (HRR216VKA and HRR216VYA) on the page offer great features and the same unsurpassed reliability. The main differences between the HRX line is the deck material, no hydrostatic tranny option and they have the 160cc motor instead of the beast 190cc unit. link to the HRR line. http://powerequipment.honda.com/lawn-mowers/hrr-series-lawn-mowers The cut supplied by the micro cut two blade design is amazing. Since I have a hectic schedule I have to cut the grass when time allows even if that means early in the morning when the grass is still damp or even right after a storm. The very first time I used this mower it was on an early Sunday morning where it had been steadily showering the past 24h and only stopped raining late in the evening the night before. My grass was easily 9"-12" long and soaked! It handled my super dense lawn (I use a lawn fert service provider) in the above conditions without bogging once and hardly leaving even the slightest remnants from the mulching action even though I had it set to 100% mulch. The Hydrostatic tranny is wonderful too. Simple and rugged. You can go from barely creeping at all (has to be about .25-.5mph max) all the way to a super brisk walk/slight jog depending on your build. Im 6'1" and in decent shape when cutting I have the speed set to about 65%-70% of full capacity. Not the cheapest machines out there but very well worth the price. My father in law is still running his first year Harmony (top of the line back then) that is 20+ years old and has only had to replace a throttle cable which was his own fault for snagging it on the fence!

Without a soil test, I'd go to a high nitrogen fertilizer instead. Something like 29-0-3 (just an example) where the first number is much higher than anything else. Since you haven't fed in fall, feed as soon as you can at bag rate. In three weeks, do it again if it's been raining reasonably regularly. If the grass has just stopped growing three weeks after that, feed one last time. If it's already going into dormancy, skip it. Next year, feed on Memorial Day, Labor Day, October 1st, and when growth stops (if it's later than October 20th or so). Skip the last feeding if growth stops earlier than that. If by the end of this season it still looks very bad, a soil test is in order.

1. Remove the existing grass and till the yard Never till in preparation for a lawn. When you rototill the bottom of the tiller digs to different depths. When you level the top, that will give you different depths of fluffy soil. When that soil settles, it will settle to the profile of the non-level layer of untilled soil underneath. But yes, remove the current grass. Best way to do that is with several applications of roundUp at 1-week intervals. Water heavily in between to get as many weeds sprouted as possible. 2. spread nice quality top soil/compost mix Nope. Your current soil is the best soil there is. All you have to do to fix it is feed it with the alfalfa. Unless you have drainage issues you wish to fix, then adding or removing top soil should be forbidden. 3. apply alfalfa fertilizer Great idea. 4. Install st augustine sod. For the shady area in the picture, St Aug would be good. Can you get a mower in there? St Aug is mowed at the mower's highest setting. Bermuda (your back lawn???) is mowed at your mower's lowest setting. Don't get those two mixed up. The reason you have weeds is your turf is not dense enough to keep the weeds out. Bermuda in the shade will never be dense enough to keep weeds out. St Aug needs to be mowed very high to keep weeds out. Second reason (maybe) you have weeds is watering too frequently. The soil should dry out completely at the surface before watering again. In the winter that means once a month max. In the summer that might mean as much as once every 7 days unless you are having an unusual drought coupled with dry winds and weak/sandy soil with pounding sunlight (like Las Vegas). If your grass will not go that length of time without water, then you are not watering long enough when you do water.

dian, we've done the tape the plastic to the floor thing and didn't find any moisture. Dh & I even talked about painting the slab for a short term cheap solution, but agree that it would look pretty awful. We went to Home Depot & found some vinyl flooring strips called Traffic Master and were on the verge of ordering it when we thought we'd better come home & do some remeasuring first. I got online & found about as many happy people as unhappy, and really, about half the unhappy folks sounded like they hadn't put it down according to directions. Still, even though it would be a short term solution for us, I don't want to look at curling edges for 6-8 months either so we've backed off that for now. Thought we'd visit a Floor & Decor tomorrow & see what other options we have. If the TrafficMaster worked, it would be ideal. It would only cost about $600, and would be able to clean it during construction, and if for some reason we actually loved it, we could patch it in to the new addition & just leave it here.