New Crabgrass and Dandelion Mower

I pride myself on having been married for almost 10 years and never buying a new lawnmower (we've never lived in an apartment either).

My first mower was electric and it was given to me by my grandfather. It was a real pain to use, dragging multiple extension cords around the yard, but it was very quiet and our yard wasn't that big so I survived.

When we moved from that house into our current house, I figured I was going to have to bite the bullet and plunk down some Hamiltons and get a mower. The yard is bigger and I didn't want to upgrade to 100 foot extension cords.

Luckily one day I spied a mower on the side of the road with a "free" sign on it. Excited, I went to the house of which the mower was in front, knocked on the door and politely asked about the mower. Not sure why I did, as the "free" sign was pretty self-explanatory. The gentleman who answered the door looked at me as if I was some teenager all messed up on goofballs. "What mower?" he asked. "That one," I said pointing. "Ain't mine," he replied. I shrugged and left and threw the mower into my truck as happy as could be. I figured somebody else started to take this treasure home and changed their mind and just left it there. Maybe they got tired of pushing it. Who knows, it was mine now.

When I got it home I inspected it further. Besides being older than my dad, it had multiple large cracks in the deck, the wheel adusters had no spring left in them to stay in position, and the screws holding the handle on were stripped so it would pop out of position because they weren't tight. Oh yeah, and it had no blade. Rats.

Getting a blade shouldn't have been a problem, you would think, but it was. This mower was an 18 incher. Pretty rare apparently. I went to 3 or 4 hardware stores before I found the right size.

Finally, later that week with the blade installed I put some gas in it and it started right up! Happy? Yes. Nothing beats free. Come to think of it, I never checked if it had oil in it. And you know what? I never checked the oil (or changed it for that matter) in the 7 years I had it.

The thing was LOUD and it vibrated so badly I was always afraid the motor was going to fly off and decapitate me, but it ran and cut my crabgrass and it was FREE, so I didn't care.

As I mentioned before, I used that thing for 7 years. Never did a bit of maintenance to it. Oh wait, I take that back, I changed the spark plug last year because I stored the mower outside and the plug had gotten so rusty a reliable electric connection with the spark plug wire could no longer be made. Anyway, this year, as much as I hated to do it, I decided I would finally let it go to the great landfill in the sky and get a new one.

There was only one issue, besides my obsession with pieces of crap, I don't like to spend my money on items that bring me no joy. There would be no electric start, no riding mower, no self-propulsion, no grass catchers, no nothing that would drive the price up. So I bought this little baby at Walmart for $138 minus my wife's 10 percent discount. Not too bad. And it's a 22 incher! Thats four more inches of cutting width. I should be able to get my lawn done in half the time. At least.