Just thought I'd post an update. I started the renovation yesterday. I pulled out all the musas, canna, colocasias, and everything non-tropical. I partitioned the bed into 5 sections (basically, 5 sections of fence, each one 8 feet wide and 8 feet front-to-back. Each section got 1 bag of Napa Floor Dry, 1 bag of Milorganite, 2 bags of Pine Bark Fines, and one condensed bale of peat moss. Yesterday I spread out each ingredient, one atop another, flattened it out with a rake, spread an entire bag of pink-label Osmocote, then triple dug each plot for even dispersal and distribution. Today I harvested about 6 garbage cans of leaves from the rain/road gutters of the adjacent houses, and spread those out amongst the beds. Then I pulled everything I had from my compost pile and gave each bed 5 or 6 shovels' worth. The compost isn't much, but it'll be worthwhile if the microbes survive and thrive. After that, I counted up my back-drop Banana plants (9 musa, 1 ensete maurelii for the shade), and the front row display of Alocasia Portoras and Red Abyssinians (5 in total) and went out to HD and picked up 15 bags of compost/manure, one bag for each hole dug. Before planting anything, I watered the entire bed extremely thoroughly, even re-digging the bed another time to make sure everything was evenly distributed and moist.... talk about disappointing. After almost 5 total hours of shoveling, I was still pulling up shovels of chalk-dust fine, seemingly waterproof sand. All the same, I stuck with it, re-turned the soil, and got my Bananas and Alocasias planted today. If I had to do it all over again (...and had a truck at my disposal..) I would have doubled up all the supplies I'd purchased. Laid out on the ground, floor dry, bark fines, etc. all look like a lot, but they disappear really quick, even if you're only digging six or 8 inches down. Tomorrow I'll be focusing on about 50 stalks of Canna, 20 Colocasias, and another 30 bags of 40lb compost/manure. Sometime next week I'll start focusing on the borders, standards, and fillers. The week after, I'll be planning for irrigation and about 40 bags of mulch. A little more research and I'll know if I wanna go with a soaker line or drip irrigation. Right now, signs are pointing to soaker hoses, putting out 1 gallon per foot per hour. When all is said and done I'll provide some photos of the finished bed.

Something bad happened that actually was a very, very good thing... After following breiaj's instructions to the letter, two of the floor tiles in the bathroom popped up a couple of days later and wouldn't stay stuck. When I pulled them up the rest of the way, I found a leak! If it hadn't been for those tiles unsticking, we wouldn't have found that leak until it did a LOT more damage - like made a big ole mess of the kitchen ceiling. So here's one way in which vinyl tile might actually be BETTER than sheet! A few notes WRT breiaj's instructions... I admit to dropping back to $3.99 paintbrushes because they became unworkable so quickly - the glue would start to dry up in the bristles while we were working and it would become more like a paddle than a brush! We didn't have any problems with bristle loss. 2" flat-ended paintbrushes were just the right size, a wider brush seemed like it would save time but was really more awkward to work with, especially with cut pieces. Don't bother wearing rubber gloves in hopes of keeping your hands clean, they stick to the tile's adhesive and to the adhesive you're spreading on and just generally irritate the crap out of you. :-) The adhesive - Armstrong's anyway - is kind of hard on your hands though, and contrary to the label does not wash off with soap and water! We ended up using a "painter's wipes" product we had on hand to clean up our hands about every hour because we would get too sticky to work effectively, and our fingertips were pretty raw and sore afterward. Even though it costs a bit more it's a lot easier to work with the smaller containers of adhesive using this brush-on method, because the bucket gunks up something awful. If you're laying more than about 100 square feet, seriously consider coughing up for the vinyl tile cutter (homedepot.com has one for about $50, or you can rent a superduper heavy-duty one for about the same for a weekend)... scoring and snapping with a utility knife sucks after a while, it's slow and hard on your hands. Make sure you have a comfortable utility knife no matter what though, and a LOT of blades. Stanley makes a really nice knife in their FatMax line, with a rubber-cushioned handle. A jamb or undercut saw ($15) makes dealing with those door jambs SO much easier than trying to cut the tile around them! We removed the baseboards; we were going to replace them with vinyl cove but the damn stuff just would not cooperate so we patched the baseboards with wood filler galore and put them back, and it looked SO much neater than butting the tiles up to the baseboards. deeje, I've checked around with several manufacturers of vinyl tile and the biggest deal WRT moisture is not to slop around too much water when you mop - contrary to popular belief, you don't need a gallon bucket full of near-boiling water and some vile chemical to get a floor clean! Try a well-squeezed-out sponge or terrycloth/microfiber mop instead of a sopping string or rag mop instead. Those microfiber cleaning cloths fit on Swiffer handles really well, if like me you are too cheap to buy the Swiffer cloths. :-) ctaylors6, the instructions in the Cryntel box agree with the Lowes guy - wash well-secured vinyl very well, rinse well, allow to dry thoroughly. I'd use something like TSP that would destroy any gloss on the existing floor. Our vinyl was trashed so we couldn't leave it, so I can't speak to the adhesive method on top of vinyl. We still haven't gotten the kitchen floor laid down yet. We had to tear out some of the subfloor and replace it, and then do a lot of leveling and sanding on the rest, got diverted with a day of electrical work, and to top it all off DH has been sick as a dog. :-( Cross your fingers for this weekend!

I don't envy you. Matter of fact, my wife and I just went to look at a 100 year old home that looks like it was NEVER updated, and the first thing I looked at was the kitchen. The previous owner had begun to work on it, but the floor has asbestos tile on a pretty spongy subfloor. I have a feeling if we jump on this (it's a foreclosure priced at about 1/2 the value of just the property alone right next door to where we're living now) before we even move in, I'm gonna be seein the basement from the kitchen!! Now, as for YOUR floor, the tile will be the easy part. Go to a hardware store, and ask them for a framing hammer (it's bigger and heavier than a normal hammer), a pair of leather gloves, and a pair of safety glasses. Then go home, raise that hammer, and take your aggressions out on that floor!! That takes care of the tile. Now, the question is, is there a 1/4" underlayment under that peel and stick tile? if there is, that's got to go along with the vinyl. That's actually a blessing in disguise, though, because it may be a huge PITA to try and remove the tiles if their just stuck right to the subfloor, and they DO have to go. I'd say for right now get the tile up, and see if you can determine exactly what you have underneath, and we'll take it from there.

Someone has to go under the house and determine what the exact problem is and then determine the best cost-effective way to fix it. No shortcuts for this problem because the problem may not be what you suspect. I realize you have a modular home, but this could be the same problem. Sagging mobile home floors: are usually a result of water damage in mobile homes with particle board flooring that doesn't hold up well when it gets wet. Moisture Barriers Stop moisture from developing directly on the mobile home floor boards and will not allow the floors to rot. https://www.hunker.com/13402356/how-to-level-sagging-mobile-home-floors https://floridaanchorandbarrier.com/re-level-mobile-home-floors/