Hi everyone. I pride myself in being able to figure out most things in life and up until this point I've been true to that, but one thing I can not figure out is how to keep a good lawn. I bought my house about 6 years ago and each passing year I've noticed my lawn get worse.

I live in the northeast and my lawn is a mix of bluegrass/rye/fescue. My house faces west and I get full sunlight in the front yard from around 11am-6pm. There are parts of my lawn that feel incredibly dense with grass...almost spongy feeling. The grass, however, looks weird. It's almost red in color in some spots, other spots the blades are brown except for the very top which is green. I mow the lawn once a week and I notice that after a weeks growth there's shorter grass and longer grass mixed in. If I change my mower setting by just once increment it's the difference between me emptying the bag 3 times or 10 times. Before I mow the lawn it looks green, but after I mow it looks like hay (brown)...and I checked and I don't mow more than 1/3 of the blade height.

I follow the Scotts fertilizer regimen. Recently, I've become convinced I have red thread so I treated with a fungicide. I have problems with mushrooms. We recently put a rock garden in the front yard and digging into the soil I noticed a lot of little white specks. I just dug out 4 large gross looking mushrooms from the rock garden...they were the consistency of tree bark. Last week I removed a 4ft wide bright orange mushroom patch from the rock garden on the left side of my house. These mushrooms grow so fast. The strange thing is both these areas get blasted with sun, my house faces west and the afternoon sun scorches the front yard.

I'm going crazy with this. About three years ago I had two large trees removed from my front yard. I had the stumps ground down but I know the mushrooms are most likely growing on the decaying roots.

I have 3 questions. First, do you think my problems are from fungus? Secondly, I'm really thinking of aerating the lawn in the fall but is it Ok to just aerate or should I aerate and overseed? I'm questioning whether to overseed because my lawn looks really dense, but I'm also worried mushrooms are going to pop up from all those little holes created by aerating.

My third question is, how can I tell what's wrong with my yard? Is there a checklist I can go through to eliminate possibilities. I've considered so many things like insect damage, grubs, fungus.

Thanks for any suggestions.