I'm in Eastern NC and last year's drought caused a lot of dead areas in my lawn. This spring every weed in NC started to pop up. It was(is) a sight to make a grown man cry so I found a very good landscaping Co nearby and they said it was beyond repair. So today the entire lawn was sprayed with industrial weed killer and in 3 or 4 days they will remove all the old grass & weeds and re-sod with Centipede and by Fri I'll have a new lawn and large water bills. I do not know the secret to eliminating weeds but I bought a stand up weed puller(Grand Daddies) and it works well with no bending over. They say Centipede is drought tolerant but I found that in extreme conditions is does need a lot of water.

You should not need to do any of that except get more sod. Centipede thrives on no fertilizer and very little other care. Now if your soil test comes back and says you have alkaline soil, then you might find out why and decide if centipede is the turf for you. If you have alkaline soil, you might look at installing bermuda instead, because centipede really likes acidic soil and no care. If you post a picture, see if your camera can focus at 3 inches away from the grass. I would be interested in seeing the tips of green, uncut grass.

Are you in Atlanta (zone 8) Or suburbia zone 7b-7a? If the latter you probably won't have the easiest time finding St. Frankenstein but I've seen it before. the problem with warm season grasses here is that they are brown for more of the year then they are green due to being dormant. People get frustrated when they have problems during the 3 or 4 months of dry hot summer with cool season grass yet for some reason they don't complain about having brown dormant warm season grass for 7+. I just came back from columbia, SC which is only 4 hours drive from here and what a difference in climate. It has rained here twice in the last 2 months yet yesterday in SC I got thunderstormed on 8 times in one day. It was like a rain forest. That is the kind of humid coastal plain weather that puts that tropical swamp grasses into high gear and we haven't had that here and we don't normally even get that kind of weather until August. Suffice it to say no matter what you choose, life in the transition zone means lawn challenges.

I struggle with some shade areas too. Never considred centipede, but have thought about various zoysias, especially shadow turf. The plugs are really expensive. Then there is the new bermuda-tif grand, but wow. Not on my budget. How about a less agreesive IVY?