[Traum]

Don't have a recommendation specifically about which route would be more suitable for you, but I've been growing patches of grass here and there on my lawns for the past 3 years, so here are a couple observations I've noticed from my own experience that would only apply to growing my own lawn.

1. I always start as early as I can (and this year, I sowed the seeds ~3 weeks ago in early March). This is weather-dependent, of course, but I need enough time for the grass to grow before the sunny and dry weather sets in. IMO it takes at least 3 months for the newly grown grass to be thick and dense enough to have any chances of surviving through to next year.

The problem is, growth is quite slow, and during the initial "baby period", the newly grown grass is high maintenance in the sense that they are both pretty frail and are pretty sensitive to the amount of moisture that is available to it through the soil. Too much rain means there is not enough sun, and then they don't grow. Not enough rain either means there is not enough sun, or there is too much sun and the soil dries out, so again they don't grow.

They are picky little bastards.

2. By May / June, the newly grown grass are gonna start looking unhealthy again bcos they don't have enough water. By June / July they are gonna brown out and die. Grass lawns are insanely water-intensive, and with the lawn watering restrictions that we have every year, lawns just turn brown every year. If the newly grown lawn isn't mature and strong enough by the time the dry weather starts arriving, they are not growing back the next year. I pretty much lost most of my newly grown patches this way in my 1st year of lawn grown bcos of this.

3. Once the water usage restrictions hit, you can only use an automatic sprinkler at some ungodly early wee hours once a week during the weekend. A similar rule applies for manual watering. No lawn is gonna grow from scratch with that little watering when the weather starts drying out.

I think you can purchase a lawn watering exemption licence from the City, but even that only affords a pretty minimal amount of extra watering time.

4. Get good bulk soil from a proper gardening place if you want the grass to grow well, and your lawn to look good. None of the pre-packaged soil from any of the standard big box stores are good. In fact, they are all crap. Their so-called garden top soil is mixed with so much sticks, wood chips, and mulch that those junk can take up anywhere between 20 - 40% of the bag. Those may work well for growing shrubs or something (I dunno -- that's just my guess), but for grass, they are horrible in my experience. The grass really doesn't grow well when the non-soil junk ratio gets high.

The quality of the soil within the same brand is also lacking -- the bag of Vigoro or Scotts soil that you buy 3 months ago could be very different than the bag you buy 3 months later (in terms of the mixture of soil and crap). The consistency only exists within the same batch of soil.

That is to say -- if I buy 6 bags of Scotts premium black earth at the same time, I can expect the contents of those 6 bags to be largely the same. But the next 6 bags of Scotts premium black earth that I buy 3 months later would not have the same mixture ratio.

And this applies to all the different brands that I've tried -- Vigoro, Scotts, Miracle-Gro, Crappy Tire / Superstore specials.

5. My immediate area seems to attract / have a lot of birds -- I really enjoy their presence. The flip side is -- I'm sure those guys eat up at least 50% of the grass seeds that I sowed. My kid and I get a good laugh out of it every time we see them pecking away on the soil, and we laughed a lot from this LOL~

In your case if you decide to grow your own thing, you'd definitely want to put up some sort of nesting to discourage / prevent racoons from digging up your lawn again -- at least during the growing period. IMO, nesting is not going to deter birds from pecking away at the seeds though.