New Lawn - Help?

I cannot predict what your dogs will do. Heck, they probably don't know themselves.

But I've laid sods of growing grass before on a lawn so long dead that most of it was just thatch and some was simply bare packed dirt. This was an entire back yard, BTW.

What we were urged to do in preparation was manual labor. We were to use a rake with three-inch spike, after rain or watering, to loosen and then level the compacted soil. This would have been the time to add more or better topsoil, fertilizer, supplements and soil corrections, etc., but we didn't.

We brought home the sods, each section about the size of a doormat, and laid them out on the adjacent patio in sections (which soon became piles) of best, okay, and not as good for whatever reason. We'd had to buy whole pallets only, and knew there'd be some we didn't use.

We laid the best ones first, in the parts of the yard which showed from the house and on the foot traffic path from the back gate. We did a line of them, starting at the center and going as close to the fence (which reached the ground) as we could get. The next line, we purposely did not align but staggered, so the checkerboard effect wouldn't be there.

Next we used the okay ones to fill in the part of the yard you couldn't see from the house's windows, following the same lines, until we'd used them up. We completed the job with the not-so-good ones, cutting them to fit up to the fence with a hoe as needed.

We were good about watering until the lawn was well established, the lines between the sods all but invisible. The worst of them had weeds, which we dealt with, but overall it was not that difficult if you could do the work of raking, lifting, and toting.

A garden-sized plot, I would not hesitate to do, and I'm no longer a young woman.

Is there a way to keep the dogs off it for six weeks or so, to let it attach to the ground below?

Maryn, thinking temporary fencing of some kind

I would presume that once it's had two or three months of active growing time--meaning it's grown enough that it needs mowing--then it's also had time to send roots deeper than the original sod's depth. After that, the dogs aren't going to do any more damage than to any other lawn. Until that point, it might still detach.

Curiosity makes me wonder if you're set on grass .There could be other ground covers which would be pet-friendly and hardier.

Maryn, thinking aloud