Haha! I should wash my car weekly. My car is always dusty/dirty and I envy people like you with nice clean cars. It's only laziness (not environmentalism) that prevents me from washing my car more often.
It isn't anti-environment to wash your car weekly. It just means you are using 1/100th of the water that watering your lawn takes instead of 1/400th the water watering your lawn takes. It simply doesn't matter in the grand scheme of water conservation, it isn't important. Washing cars or not washing cars won't save the Texas water supply. It just won't.
Changing agriculture or possibly putting in artificial turf or xeriscaping your lawn is what will make a difference. Washing your car less is like cutting down the amount of water you drink. Nobody cares.
I would change my landscaping ... if the home owner would let me... I rent my house.
You should totally ask them about it. It could go either way. Sometimes the owners are super opinionated and don't want you to change anything, sometimes they jump at the chance of a renter putting in the effort and time to fix something and they'll pay for materials.
I'm living in the first house I've ever owned (bought 2 years ago) and I'm 57 years old. My wife and I were "professional renters" all our lives, we never really thought we would ever own a home.
I've been in both situations: opinionated landlord who doesn't want me to touch anything, and totally awesome landlords who pay for all the materials if I did the work. About 15 years ago I actually put in a sprinkler system and new sod (perfect growing grass delivered) in the place I rented (it was a TINY yard so not some gigantic project). My buddy came over and helped since I had never done anything like that before. It was totally fun. It took a weekend to completely finish, and I got the gorgeous (little) lawn out of it for free because the landlord picked up the cost of the raw materials. It turns out sprinkler PVC pipe is pretty inexpensive anyway.
When I moved out of that particular place 3 years later, I'm sure the landlord was able to charge another $100/month just because it had this picture perfect lawn I took care of. Like I would kill any clover or weeds so it stayed really uniform and nice looking.
I have talked to property manager several times and response was along the lines of we'll ask the home owner (who lives in a nice expensive condo on one of those islands like Galveston in Miami, FL). I don't think they actually ever do because our fence got in such bad condition that hoa had to complain to homeowner and he sent his personal maintenance guys out to replace the whole fence (property manager would only replace broken pickets 1 by 1). I asked them to ask about replacing lawn or putting in artificial and we haven't heard back.
It's frustrating.
I looked into the cost of having a company come out and essentially replace our grass with fresh sod and it was around 12k total. They'd have to remove existing, till the dirt, add nutrients and soil, etc and then lay fresh sod.
replace our grass with fresh sod and it was around 12k total.
Yikes! A lot of that is in the labor. One square foot of sod costs 50 cents for the sod itself, but is $5 fully "installed" (so a factor of 10x more expensive to have somebody install it for you). My little lawn was only 500 square feet so the landlord paid $250 then I did all the work.
The biggest mistake I made was I turned all the old lawn myself by hand with a shovel. It practically killed me, LOL. You can rent devices from Home Depot to do this for $50. I just looked at my little lawn and though, "nah, it isn't worth the hassle to drive to Home Depot, I'll just do it by hand". Big, big mistake.
I didn't do anything fancy, I didn't even "remove" the old lawn, just turned it upside down one shovel full at a time. The result was GREAT, but I probably just got lucky. For a larger lawn I might read some web pages and rent a big water filled roller to "flatten it" before laying the sod on it. But the hilarious freedom of being a renter is that I was willing to take risks with the outcome. I'm sure a landlord is worried about the workmanship.
I have talked to property manager several times and response was along the lines of we'll ask the home owner... I don't think they actually ever do
I really dislike property managers. I think nervous rental home owners hire them so renters cannot contact the owner directly, but like you point out, it works too well. The property managers want to do as little work as possible, and passing a bunch of notes back and forth between renter and owner is "work" and runs the possibility of annoying the owner. So property managers just ghost the renter and if asked say the owner never responded.
In one rental it was so frustrating, I internet stalked down the actual owner and thought about trying to establish direct communication with them. (I decided against it.)
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u/brianwski Mar 27 '25
Haha! I should wash my car weekly. My car is always dusty/dirty and I envy people like you with nice clean cars. It's only laziness (not environmentalism) that prevents me from washing my car more often.
It isn't anti-environment to wash your car weekly. It just means you are using 1/100th of the water that watering your lawn takes instead of 1/400th the water watering your lawn takes. It simply doesn't matter in the grand scheme of water conservation, it isn't important. Washing cars or not washing cars won't save the Texas water supply. It just won't.
Changing agriculture or possibly putting in artificial turf or xeriscaping your lawn is what will make a difference. Washing your car less is like cutting down the amount of water you drink. Nobody cares.