Lawn is Fine, in the Right Place
Something that'll probably surprise you coming from the guy who's spent eight years ripping out grass: I'm not anti-lawn. Not what you'd expect after last week's water-bill lesson, I know.
Here's my actual position. A patch of lawn where somebody actually uses it, kids running around, grandkids doing somersaults, a dog that needs a place to be a dog, that's worth watering. That's not waste. That's a yard doing its job.
What I'm against is the other 4,000 square feet. The strip along the side fence nobody walks on. The slope out back too steep to mow safely anyway. The patch between the driveway and the property line that exists purely so you have something to spray water on twice a week. That grass isn't doing anything for you. It sits there costing money and drinking water that gets more expensive every year, and it usually looks kind of sad because nobody thought hard about whether it should even be there.
So this week isn't about killing all your grass. It's about sorting which grass is earning its keep and which is just... there.
How to do this
Walk your yard. Really walk it, maybe with a cup of coffee, maybe early like I do, and look at every patch of lawn you've got. For each one, ask: who stands on this? When was the last time a foot touched this grass on purpose?
Be honest. Not "well, someone could." Actually touched.
Mark the sections that pass the test. That's your keep list. Everything else is a candidate.
For the candidates, nothing drastic yet. We'll get to the actual removal process in a later lesson, and there's a right way and a wrong way to pull lawn that saves you a ton of grief. For now I just want you looking at your yard with new eyes and starting a list, mental or real, of what stays and what goes.
On doing too much at once
Let me tell you about my son Travis. He watched me do this yard by yard over a few years and got excited, understandably, and put in a whole xeriscape at his place in Lehi basically all at once. Big beds, lots of new plants, the whole front yard converted in a couple weekends.
First month, he called me three times in a mild panic. Everything looked droopy. Some of it looked flat-out dead. He was convinced he'd wasted a small fortune, and Marian was hearing about it every dinner because I was hearing about it every dinner.
It wasn't dead. Native plants sulk the first year. They're putting energy into roots you can't see instead of leaves you can, and they look unhappy about it the whole time. I talked him off the ledge three separate times that summer. By year two his yard looked great. By year three it looked better than mine, which I'll admit only to you.
The real lesson isn't the sulking, though that's true and you should know it. It's that Travis converted everything at once, so when the sulking happened, it happened everywhere at the same time, and it felt like a disaster instead of a normal part of the process. Done in sections the way I do it, one bed sulking wouldn't have scared him, because he'd have had established beds right next to it looking fine, reminding him this works.
So when you get to the removal stage, whenever that is for you, don't do your whole yard in one weekend. Section it. Let one area establish before you tear out the next. It's slower and it's better for your sanity, and it's better for your wallet too, since you're not buying and planting everything all at once.
The actual point
Right-sizing your lawn isn't about hating grass. It's about being honest with yourself about which parts of your yard are doing something for you and which parts are just habit. A lot of us water grass because that's what's always been there, not because we ever decided we wanted it there.
Once you've got your walk-the-yard list done, you'll have a real, honest map of what's worth keeping green and what's a candidate for something that belongs here instead, something that'll look right in August instead of embarrassed.
Before next time
Do the walk. Make the list, keep versus candidate. Don't remove anything yet, just look and be honest with yourself about which grass earns its water.