Also, would we contact a landscaper or a lawn care company to lay the seed/sod? You can do it yourself. Laying the sod is the easy part. Depending how big your lawn area is, get some friends, some beer, food and maybe some knee pads and you can get it down quickly. If you contract it out you want a landscaper. A lawn care company usually just maintains your lawn. The Rutgers Extension Office has a good publication on How to lay sod that you should read. You should do a soil test to see what the soil is like. You might want to have your contractor handle the soil prep. You'll probably need to till in some compost to raise the organic matter of your soil. Make sure you get the soil test that includes organic content evaluation. Also make sure the soil slopes away from the foundation to help keep your basement dry. Again, these are things you can do yourself. Rent a roto tiller, have the required amount of compost delivered and have at it. Then use a stiff flat tined rake to do the grading. You should aim for at least 1" per foot for at least 10'. Use a long level to check. The tools you'll need are: Tiller (can rent) Lawn Roller (can rent) Rakes, not the leaf rake type (cheap but I think you can rent from some places should buy at least one to have) Wheelbarrow(s) (if you have a big yard, buy one, rent another) Will help transport compost, sod, etc. 3' Level to check grade. Spreader (can rent but you should probably buy for maintenance later. This will also be a good time to install landscape edging, outdoor lights, irrigation system. If you don't have an irrigation system you'll need some hose end sprinklers because the sod will need daily watering for at least a couple of weeks. Coming into the summer fresh, you'll want to make sure it doesn't dry out. After the first few weeks you don't need to water every day. Products you'll need are: Compost Maybe some topsoil if you need to do a lot of grading. Fertilizer Lime if your soil test indicates you need it. Any other soil amendments indicated by your soil test. Now at this point you can seed or sod but like bpgreen said, it's kinda late in the season for seed. Sod isn't too bad in NJ. Somewhere around $35-$40/100 sq ft delivered if you go straight to the sod farm and not a nursery or other middleman. 2-3x that if you want it installed, not counting the soil prep. Most bulk delivered materials are measured in yards so here's a tip using compost as an example. Assume you need 3" of compost and you have 3,000 sq ft of soil (good idea to add compost to your planting areas too) 3" is 0.25' so 3,000 sq ft X .25' = 750 cubic feet. 750 / 27 = about 28 yards. Doing it yourself vs hiring a good landscaper will save you a lot of money. Having your contractor do it usually isn't as good if he doesn't sub it out to a good landscaper. It's not hard and you could probably knock it out in a weekend depending on the size of your property. Just take the time to do it right. No point spending hundreds of dollars on sod only for it to look like crap in a year or two.

The link below will provide you with detailed information from the Univ. of Tennessee extension service and includes 3 options for removing bermudagrass from a tall fescue lawn. Actually, the option you may want to look at most closely is the use of Acclaim Extra, which can be purchased at a John Deere Landscapes/Lesco store. The folks there should also be able to provide additional helpful information for you. https://utextension.tennessee.edu/publications/Documents/W237.pdf

I know more about the cool season low water grasses, but I did pick up some knowledge about the warm season ones during my initial research. I considered buffalo grass, but decided against it because it would have a very short growing season here and it requires a lot of sun and I have a lot of shade in the back. If you've got Bermuda grass, it uses relatively little water, but it does use more than buffalo grass. If you want the Bermuda to fill in and take over, you'll need to use practices that favor Bermuda. Those include mowing low and fertilizing about 1 lb of actual N per month. That may be difficult to do with an organic program. For a really good description of how to tend Bermuda, do a search for Bermuda Bible. TW wrote it and there used to be links to it here. If they're gone, you can probably find it using Google. If you want to switch to buffalo grass, you'll want to kill the Bermuda first. If you're going to kill it organically, you'll need to wait until it warms up again, then water it well and cover it with clear plastic and keep it covered for at least a couple of weeks. The hotter it is when you do this, the better your results will be. Once that's done, you can plant seed, plugs or sod. Seed is the cheapest, sod is the most expensive, plugs are in between. Seed is probably the hardest to establish, sod the easiest and plugs in between. The plug and sod varieties don't produce seed heads and also don't produce pollen, and those are both important considerations. The seed heads are sort of burrs and the pollen can be tough on people with allergies. I'd probably go with plugs if I were doing it. Once it gets started, you want to mow it high and fertilize it very little. Fertilizing it more won't really hurt it, but will allow other things to grow that won't compete if it's not fertilized much. I would give it 1/2 lb N per 1000 sq ft per YEAR (note that's half as much as Bermuda uses in a month). You could bump it to a full pound a year, but I wouldn't go any higher than that. There's somebody who posted here for a while who planted some buffalo grass in the PHX area and he kept a blog about it. Here is a link to a thread where he posts a link to his blog.

There are several things to do. Here are the basics of lawn care as I have gleaned them from 18 years on lawn care forums: Watering Deep and infrequent is the mantra for watering. Deep means 1 inch all at one time. Place some cat food or tuna cans around the yard, and especially in the thin/dead spots. Turn on the sprinkler and time how long it takes to fill all the cans. If the cans in the thin spots never seem to fill while the other cans are overflowing, then you have a sprinkler coverage issue. Once you have that watering time memorized, that will be your watering time from now on. Frequency depends on the daily high air temperature more than any other factor (and there are a bunch). With temps in the 80s, you should be watering once every 2 weeks. Temps in the 70s - once every 3 weeks. Temps lower than 70 should be once every month unless you're frozen. Mowing Mow at the mower's highest setting, especially in warmer times of the year. Fertilizing Make your first application in late May. Second application in early September. I would strongly suggest using an organic fertilizer like soybean meal or alfalfa pellets (rabbit chow). Those come in 20 kilo bags at the feed store. Use them at a rate of 10 kilos per 100 square meters. The last application should be after the grass stops growing but before the frost hits. This last app should be a straight, fast acting nitrogen like uncoated urea. This is the winterizer and will help the grass to come out of winter dormancy next March/April. Weeds Deal with weeds by spot spraying with Weed-b-Gon in mid April and mid September if needed. For those few you have now, pick those out by hand before they become a problem. Spray herbicides go on as a leaf mist, not a soil drench. The lawn is bumpy because the soil was not prepared right. The surface should have been scraped off to take the high spots off and fill the low spots. If you rototilled first, then you have 3 full years of settling to wait out. It will get bumpier and bumpier until then. That's when you deal with the bumps and holes. For the dead spots, it would be best to use the same sod from the same supplier. The varieties of KBG seed are numerous. If you use one of the more modern ones and the contractor used something else, you'll have color variations. Having said that, if you want to improve the color of the lawn, say after living with it for a year, then consider getting some of the improved seed varieties, mix them, and scatter in September of 2020. They will take a year or more to really come in with the darker color of green, so you need some patience.