Lawn advice please

We moved into our new place in March and sorted out the rear lawn which is now nice and lush however it is now time to consider the front lawn.
The front lawn has only been mowed and never maintained. It is full of weeds and little clover type plants and other weeds. See attached pictures.
I was thinking of rotavating the whole area and starting from scratch by planting lawn seed and letting it grow.
The wife is not too keen on this and wants to use a all purpose weed killer like Evergreen Complete that you sprinkle on the lawn and it kills weeds but not the grass. We did a small patch and it seems to work to an extent but makes all the stuff it kills off black.
Looking at the pictures should we use the weed killer or start from scratch and if starting from scratch what is the best time of the year to do this?

 

How big is your lawn?

Personally, given that turf is only around £2.50 a roll, if it's not too big, I'd re-turf it. From your photos it could be that your lawn is past saving, but that may not be the case.

 

our lawn looks exactly like that. i have just put seed down on top with a load of compost to overseed the area and hopeifully the new grass will start outgrowing the clover. will let you know how it goes!

 

We have eventually agreed that we will rotavate the area to kill off the old grass, level it and plant new grass seed.
We used a fast grow type of multi grass from Westfields on our rear lawn and it looks nice and dark green, but needs cutting every 4 -5 days.
As we have more time with the front lawn, we would like a lawn that looks nice and lush but is slow growing and only needs mowing about once every 10 days.
Can any one recommend a type of lawn seed to use in this instance? We will only be doing this next year in about late March.

 

Rotovating alone won't kill the existing grass. It will chop up any perennial weed roots which will eventually regrow. It would be better to spray with glyphosate when the lawn weeds are just coming into life and then rotovating and raking level then waiting a few weeks for any persistent weeds to regrow, spray again and then do your final preparations for seeding.

Spray on a dry day in March and cultivate as deep as you can to allow for good root establishment. You'll find slow growing seed mixes leave out rye grass. There's plenty out there in stores or online.

 

Sorry I forgot to mention that at present we are using Evergreen all in one weed killer to get rid of the weeds first. Once that is done, we will rotavate however grass seed. There are so many vareities of greass seed out there and to a novice gardener it is confusing.
It would be appreciated if you could point me towards any links to lawn seed without rye grass etc. Many thanks

 

This one or this one is slightly cheaper. They're just the first two I came across by searching. I buy in bulk from a number of suppliers and haven't used these but the first mix I've used before with good success.

 

Take a look here. They are very helpful if you speak to them - Dan is the Sales Mgr. Very good.

http://www.pitchcare.com/shop/fine-lawn-grass-seed/pro-52-greenfine-fine-lawns-without-ryegrass.html