Lawn Grade Repair? Any Recomendations?

I'm a big fan of the long fescue (sp). I put it down in some spots and boy has that stuff shot up and taken over in the back yard. only problem is if I do my whole lawn I'll have to mow constantly. Although long fescue is not to resiliant to dog pee. My dog has done a number to my seeded areas.

 

A colleague who used to do real estate law told me that one good way to get the builder to pay attention is to threaten to (or actually) sue them AND the county. They have lots of interest in keeping the county permit granters happy. Lets hope no one has to go that far, though.

Pam D.

 

I moved in 2 years ago June. Despite watering my VM sodded lawn looked like road kill by the end of July. I too found construction gravel under many of the dead sections of sod. For the next 3 months my neighbor (whos sod was laid at the same time) and I battled with VM to have our properties resodded. Battles were raged in cyberspace via e-mails with photo attachments sent to every VM email address I could find. Finally at the end of October after losing a couple of days of work for midday meetings with VM managers they came to resod our lawns. I took another half day off to make sure they completely removed the old lawn large rocks and gravel. Initially they only removed the back yard. The onsite supervisor said thats all they were supposed to do. I had to call 3 VM managers before I found one to instruct the sod crew to do the entire lawn. Now after a year and a half of regular watering, fertilizing and mulch mowing, my lawn is established and is one of the best looking on the block.

 

Cliff - who did you contact at the county? VM refuses to do anything about the grading at my backyard since we are beyond the warranty period.

 

An amazing story kholbert. Sad, but true that this is the kind of grit and determination needed to deal with some builders here and get it "right".

 

I believe it was the Building and Development office. It's been about 6 years since I called about this issue, so I may be wrong. That would be a good place to start.

 

I've been trying to figure out what to do about this problem. Part of me wants to go the county route and force VM to fix it. The other part wants me to just pay a company to come in and do it right the first time. I have very little faith that VM would come in a do it correctly based off my past experiences. They tend to come in and do the quick fix that gets by. I'm still conflicted.

 

A little update here. After the storm a week or so ago we had a massive white water river going through our back yard. In one area it was more than 20 feet wide. We took pictures of this and sent them to VM last week.

Today they had a team of contractors at our house looking at our lot. Apparently they are going to completely regrade our entire yard and resod it. They took one look at it and said it looked like a river bed. They are also going to be fixing our neighbors yards as well. As it's not just our yard that's the problem but also all the yards around us. This is great news. I could have fixed our yard but not my neighbors.

I'm a bit excited right now. I did not expect them to fix it but they are going to. I'll let you all know if they do a good job