Lawn Refurb - Any advice welcome :)

Hey everyone - I'm new here

I'm not a total newbie when it comes to gardening and lawns but this is the biggest project I've undertaken to date.

I bought my house a couple of years ago and the garden was in a terrible state - I've slowly improved it by removing old structures and an old path, installing a new fence and border and I'm now in a position to finally tackle the lawn (god help me).
It's not a huge garden (around 55 sqm) but I work full time and live alone so it's taking me quite a while to get it sorted out - plus I've been juggling renovating the house at the same time. The garden is finally ready to have its day though!

Here are the issues:
1. The lawn is 80% weeds/moss, 10% rough grasses and 10% actual serviceable lawn. It suffers in particular with dock leaves and clover.
2. The lawn isn't just uneven, it's completely different heights in several places. I believe there were flowerbeds dug in the past that have sunk and over the years grass/weeds have spread over these and the result is that the sides of the garden are around 4-5" lower than the middle and the middle patch of lawn is a mound/hump.
3. I've had to remove an old concrete path from the middle of the lawn - this has left a rut around 2" deep and it now looks like a baseball field.
4. I had to remove old washing line poles - these were in concrete around 3ft deep. I've filled in the holes with soil so they're now level with the rest of the rut.
5. Access is atrocious. My house is a mid terrace with no rear access and steps into and out of the house both front and rear. The garden is enclosed by a 6ft fence made from planks that can't be disassembled, so there's no way of even removing a panel to gain access. This means that any tools, machinery, topsoil etc will have to come through the house.

I've decided based on all of the above that there's probably no point in trying to salvage the lawn as it stands as it'd be more trouble than it's worth.
There's too much repair work and leveling to do and the weeds and moss are so prevalent that by the time they're all dead there'll basically be just a muddy patch left anyway so I might as well start from scratch. In order to level the lawn without rotavating I think I'd probably need at least a couple of tonnes of topsoil and there's just no way to get it to the rear garden :/
I'm thinking I should use roundup to ensure absolutely everything is totally dead and then look at rotavating and raking it to get it level, but this definitely something I zero experience with.

If anyone has any advice I'd really appreciate it big time - maybe there's something I haven't thought of that would make the whole process easier
Initially I thought that rotavators capable of digging over dead turf would be too big to fit through an internal door but I think Homebase Tool Hire does a "medium duty" rotavator that might be sufficient (8.3hp) and it's only 20" wide. I've no idea if this is suitable though. It also weighs 111kg and I'm not sure I'll be able to work with it - I'm a bit of a weakling.

If I go down the path of starting from scratch - what would you suggest? I had in mind:

1. Roundup the whole lawn and let everything die back
2. Rotavate the area
3. Rake out any stones/rocks/turf/weeds
4. Possibly rotavate again if needed and repeat the raking
5. Use a length of wood and some ropes to drag the soil to try to get it as level as possible and rake until smooth
6. Walk the area to compact it
7. Lightly rake the surface ready for new turf/seed
8. Seed or Turf. I've no idea which to go for but at this time of year I suspect seed would be safer due to the warmer weather. That said, I live in Scotland and it rains constantly and never seems to get above 15c I've seeded a full lawn in the past during the summer and had very good results but my only experience with turf was a nightmare as it all shrank when I left it to go to work for a day. Oops.
I work full time and my only time off is on weekends.

Here are a couple of photos of the garden after a mow - don't be deceived by the green; most of that is clover/moss, not grass
Also, as these are top down pictures it's not clear just how misshapen the lawn is but it's not even close to flat - mowing the grass is like mountaineering and some areas to the edge of the hump have a gradient of close to 30 percent.

As the garden was when I moved in:


The garden currently:


Thank you so much in advance!

Sarah

 

Good evening Sarah and welcome to the site. I think you have hit the nail on the head when you say start from scratch. Personally, I would visit the local Wilko`s and get a bottle of Glyphosate (the same stuff Roundup contains, but a lot cheaper) and kill off the, for want of a better word, "lawn". Once rotovated you can stand back and, leisurely, decide how you want the garden.

 

Two threads for you. Beginning to end result.

Plenty of advice and discussion in them.

http://gardenerscorner.co.uk/forum/threads/building-a-new-lawn.96511/
http://gardenerscorner.co.uk/forum/threads/renovate-or-maybe-start-from-scratch.97926/