If you can indulge my tired ramblings, I'll just say you could do like Pete Denny (GCI Turf) has done and take care of your neighbor's yard with a fungicide, and get the satisfaction of doing it and helping both them and yourself at the same time(by making sure you have a good PreM barrier, and warding off evil weeds!). Keep in mind, not everyone has the same #lawngoals that we lawn nuts do, and I actually was talking to my wife about that this afternoon. Funny thing is that I happened to read a story about the same thing that I'm mentioning in this post the night before. Matter of fact, it was the last thing I read as I fell asleep. It set my day into a good mood when I woke up yesterday AM (it's Friday as I post this).
Read the thread for yourself.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/elal2/_/c18z0z2
Let me preface this by saying that today, I needed to mow my entire yard since I've been out of town at the hospital with my daughter since last Friday. I sprayed the yard with 0.25#/N, and I was expecting it to look completely overgrown when I pulled up, but it wasn't. Yes, it needed to be mowed, and yes, it was tall, but it wasn't terrible.
This past Friday, about 10 minutes after I finished mowing and spraying my yard, my neighbor came over around 4PM to ask me if I would take a look at their dryer. She said that she called a repairman to come look at it, and he changed the timer, charged them $179 and it still wasn't drying the clothes, so she called him back to take a look at it. He told them that they needed to clean out their dryer vent to the outside. She was talking about this with her husband, and he sent her over to ask me if I'd take a look at it. She said they'd rather pay me than someone who would take advantage of them like that.
The family is from El Salvador, and her husband Jorge doesn't speak much English. He is a very hard worker, who installs flooring leaving before the sun rises, and pulling into the driveway with his van many times after dark during the summer. Those are very LONG hours. They are great neighbors, polite children and lots of extended family members who come and visit. I always look forward to the 4th of July because they go WILD with fireworks and put on AWESOME displays, and
always clean up the debris. Their sons have offered me drinks during the hot days while I'm working in the yard, insisting that I take them, which I oblige even though I've got one on the porch. They enjoy playing soccer in the front yard.
Anyways, I was on the porch with my wife, and my wife volunteered me, because I'm helpful like that, but in my mind, I was doing the math about the time it would take to diagnose (dryers are pretty easy to fix) go get the parts from the appliance repair shop, and drive back. Keep in mind we were supposed to drive to the hospital that evening, and I had a 3 hour drive ahead of me. So like a smart husband, I agreed, and said, "Let me grab some tools." I got my meter, and some tools, and headed over to the house.
I'll wrap this up in a few sentences because I'm tired. My troubleshooting allowed me to fix this with minimal cost and no down time for them.
Like my lot, their lot also has some drainage issues, and the vent opening for their dryer actually is below the grade of the soil surface, with a street elbow that was broken off. When we got the heavy rain a while back, the water level actually rose up enough to fill the 4" vent pipe through the foundation of their house into the opening of where the flex pipe comes out of the wall. Because the opening of the dryer outlet where the pipe came out of the wall was higher than the flex pipe, it created a low spot for the water to fill that flex pipe without going into the actual dryer, because that opening is about at the same height, i.e. the flex pipe was lying on the ground, and raised up about 2" to connect to the dryer and the wall outlet.
I changed out the flex pipe, used my shop vac, my Eley sprayer wand and a vent cleaning brush (very cool tool that was about $30 at Lowe's) to clear out the clog that had formed with a load of water and lint. I then added 2 ells to get the opening above grade with a proper vent flap. Total repair time was about 2 hours. Parts ran about $80 with the cleaning tool. She was thankful, and handed me some cash to cover the expenses for the parts (so I thought). She also gave me a dish of some type of stewed beef and rice (which was AMAZING as I was starving), as well as ensalada rosa(looked like pepto bismol lol), which was a special dish served during weddings and Christmastime.
Back to what my point was: I noticed that their vehicles weren't there today after I had finished mowing. She actually has a newborn baby, and I figured that they were running errands, but they were gone for quite a while. Their nephew who used to live with them just bought a house, and he and his fiance just moved out. That leaves Jorge to take care of the lawn, and I know he's at work.
I had to use my rotary zero turn to mow the front first to a reasonable height where I'm not emptying the catcher every pass, so I finished the front, and rolled over to their yard and mowed, trimmed and edged their yard. Sure, I was eyeballing all the kyllinga and various other nasty weeds that were in their yard, but realized that they would appreciate it all the more if I made Today "their" day.
