I have read several other similar threads about recovering a lawn and decided to start my own instead of hijack somebody else's. Thank you in advance for patience repeating some answers. Sorry for the book but I wanted to include all the details.

My lawn is a unique situation. I purchased a neglected and foreclosed home December 2012 in New Hampshire. It sat vacant all of 2012 at the least and possibly before. The yard was peppered with trash and objects as well as had little makeshift garden boxes, inflatable pools, trampolines etc killing localized sections of the lawn. The lawn had gone to a hay field for at least 2012's season.

Spring 2013 I cleared all of the lawn of the objects etc. I painstakingly mulched up the matted down hay left over with my lawn tractor. I didn't really rake or bag it but I did side discharge it all the way to the woods. I reseeded bald spots and hoped for the best.

I winter fertilized october of 2013. In the spring it greened up nice early. I put down weed and feed sometime in the mid spring when broadleaf was starting to pop up. It did a fair job of fighting the stuff back.

I water it Monday, Wednesday and Friday for 20 minutes from my Hunter irrigation system. I have well water and it is high in iron. I mow an inch at a time roughly with my mulching tractor set at 5 out of 6. I think it is around 3.5" grass when done.

My back yard which is a bit wet to begin with seems to be doing quite well. It is very thick and stays green. It grows way faster than the front to the point where I can barely tell where I'm mowing in the front but the back bogs down the deck badly. I actually reduced the watering to 10 minutes on the back yard thinking I was over watering it. The bald spots in the back yard are gone and I can't even find where they were.

The front and side yard are a different story. They are green and grass grows but not as well and it gets bald spots and some browner spots. I also have a large spot where an inflatable pool was that is fully grass but looks very different from the rest of the lawn. My septic is under the front lawn.

I'm trying to decide what best to do to really bring this thing back without starting over. I have thought of aerating, dethatching, fertilizing, spray weed control etc. If nothing can be done this year I'm ok with that, I'm just trying to get a clear direction to get started.