Video Library

Do My Own Lawn Care - Square Footage

By DoMyOwn staff

Buying too much or too little product when treating your grass can be a waste of time and money. To get the right amount of product you will need to know the square footage of your lawn. Watch this episode to learn how to measure and calculate your lawn's square footage.

 Do My Own Lawn Care - Square Footage Video Play

Video Transcript

We are making good progress on this lawn rehab! I've taken care of a lot of the old landscaping, I've pruned up a lot of the trees and now I need to get the square footage of my yard. So why get the square footage of your yard? We could fill up a sprayer or a spreader, throw out our control products or seed and hope for the best, but that would be a huge waste of time and most likely your money.

By getting the square footage of our yard, we can do some calculations to figure out the amount of product we're going to need, to control weeds and figure out how much grass seed and fertilizer that we're going to need in the future. So the way that I'm going to tackle getting a square footage of this yard, is I'm going to kind of mentally section of different areas of the yard into the length and width of it. So like right here on this side of the Crape Myrtles, I'm going to kind of divide off and take that little square right there, get the length and width, write it down, call it Section A or whatever.

And then on the other side there's another kind of rectangle section that I'm just going to section off mentally, get the length and width of that, section B write it down, move on and do that throughout the whole yard. So you know on the whole front yard right here, get the side, the back and this other side as well. To get the measurements of these sections, I'm going to use a large tape measure, a busted up landscaping stone, the mighty pen, and a good old note card.

If you'll remember square footage is simply length times width, so that's what I'll get for each section. That's all there is to it! For each one of my sections, I'm just going to simply take my large tape measure and my busted up landscaping stone here, I'll just start stretching out my tape measure, place my landscaping stone under it to weigh it down and just stretch it out and start measuring each the section. I'll write the measurements down on my note card and just keep track as I go along.

One of these days the jungle will be no more. If it's possible, get a bird's eye view of your property. That way all the little different sections that you walked and measured, you can draw down on paper and label it all, so you can just keep track of it. Now there's a couple different ways you can do this, you can go on Google Maps obviously, type in your address and just zoom in on your property and get a general idea from there. The county that I live in here in Georgia has what they call the geographic information systems data browser or G.I.S. for short.

This is really cool, it's kind of like Google Maps, again you can type in your address zoom in on your property and it'll show you the actual surveyors lot that they used to do the tax assessments. Now this is cool because you have different tools that you can use to actually measure out your lot and get the exact square footage. The reason I don't want to use this one is because it doesn't take into account the landscaping, that's in my yard. I've already pointed out the backyard half of it is a jungle, they don't take that into account.

There's not going to be any grass growing there, so I don't want to measure that square footage. So what am I going to use to get the bird's eye view for my property? Drone time! I mean come on, any time I have an excuse to fly my drone, I'm going to do it.

After walking the property and mapping out and measuring all these different sections, here is what I came up with. Section A, that's the small little square space by the mailbox that came out to be 121 square feet. Section B is the small rectangle on the other side of the Crape Myrtles, that's 322 square feet. Section C, that's the main portion of my front yard, that's 1,050 square feet. Section D, that's the small side yard on the left side here of the house, that's where the AC units are, that's 704 square feet.

So I'm going to consider all of that, the front yard and left side of the house total of that is 2,197 square feet, moving on to the back side of the house, I've got this small little section here. I'm calling that section E, it's a small square in the back, that's about 437 square feet. Section F, that's the main portion of the backyard, that's 528 square feet. Section G is kind of this small little rectangle that I couldn't get with the main part of the backyard, I sectioned that off. I got 1,131 square feet.

And then over here on the side and where all the moss and those Bradford Pears are that we pruned down, that section; that's section H, that was 2,100 square feet. So the total of the backyard and the right side of the house came to 4,196 square feet giving us a grand total of 6,393 square feet. So I'm going to round it off and say, we've got about 6,400 square feet that we're working with.

6,400 square feet of lawn rehab, walk in the park for D.I.Y. like me. Heck I even do my own pest control dot com, see what I did there? See what I did? Next few steps I've got to do to tackle this lawn, I need to get a back pack sprayer and I got to get the product I'm going to use to treat. Now if you're listening closely Heath recommended a product called Speed Zone for my particular needs. We'll make a video on that later and talk more about that detail.

If you need help figuring out what type of products that you need for your lawn in your circumstances, reach out to our customer service staff, simply shoot them an email or pick up the phone and give them a call. If you want to know more about lawn care and lawn care products click on the link in the description below or hit that little eye icon on the upper right hand corner of this video. As always if you like this video, please hit the thumbs up. Feel free to leave comments, questions in the comments section below and also make sure to subscribe to our channel and follow along with me as I continue the journey of growing my own lawn. Thanks for watching!