Two days of this past week were spent laying sod for a client. Another first for me now that I'm on my own. They have a great back yard area that was recently landscaped with stone retaining walls. They also just finished adding on to their back deck. The turf area, or what was left of it, was bermudagrass. However, it was way too shady for that species thus the reason for there not being much there.We decided to go with Emerald zoysiagrass, a much more shade tolerant species. The leftover bermuda and weeds got two doses of round-up before the new turf was put down. I prepped the soil bed a little and started laying sod around noon on the first day. I had to wheelbarrow each load of sod down a small hill to the backyard. I got a little over a pallet down the first day. I got the rest down early afternoon on day two. I spent a couple hours cutting it in and thoroughly watering.
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| Emerald Zoysiagrass |
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| The first wheelbarrow load |
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| One Pallet |
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| Two Pallets |
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| Three Pallets |
The only mistake I made and it was almost a big one, was greatly overestimating how much sod I needed. I ordered 4 pallets and only used exactly 3. How could you be so far off you might ask. Laziness. I measured his backyard twice to figure out how much I needed. The first time I just stepped off to get an estimate, which came out to 2000 square feet. The second time was with an actual tape measure. In my head the number didn't seem that much different from what I had calculated the first time. One pallet will cover 450 square feet, so I ordered 4 pallets. As I approached a slight panic about what I'm going to do with this extra pallet of sod, I went back and checked my real measurements and sure enough, it came out to 1300, pretty much exactly 3 pallets. What an amateur thing to do and I should have known better, especially when I can't afford to be absorbing a whole pallet of sod into my profit for the day. Fortunately the Lord was being gracious to be and allowed me an escape. My parents next-door neighbor just happened to be resodding his yard the next day. So I called him and he said he would take it. Other than having hand load and unload an entire pallet of sod, it turned out okay.
I definitely learned my lesson.
