Spray 'Roundup' a couple of weeks before you till. Your still going to have weeds coming up later, but this will get a start on killing some of it, especially the centipede. After you till and level, keep the area well watered, which will cause weed seeds to germinate. Spray Roundup again after the new weeds come up and are nice and lush. Use a weed preventer ( such as 'Dimension' ) in May , which will keep the crabgrass controlled. The crabgrass seed doesn't germinate until nights are warm, so you will have thousands of crabgrass seeds in your soil , just waiting to ruin your new lawn later in the spring.

I have a few questions for you.

Why Zeon Zoysia? What is it about that variety that seems most attractive? In Atlanta it will be brown from the first frost until mid April (about 1/3 of the year).

Are you sure the weeds include centipede? St Augustine looks a lot like centipede.

What are you looking for in a lawn? Do you want the yard of the month or just want to keep the mud out of the house? You seem to want more than mud protection, because weeds are perfectly fine for that, but what are you looking for. I can just about guarantee that if you rototill the yard you will HATE yourself for the next 3 years as the surface settles into a bumpy mess for your lawn mower. Professional landscapers use a tractor and box blade to prepare soil for landscaping. That takes about an hour for most homes and not much more for small acreage. Obstacles like trees are the only thing that slows those guys down. The box blade scrapes the surface only.

If your soil is hard, you can soften it with shampoo. Spray the shampoo at a rate of 3 ounces per 1,000 square feet and follow that up with 1/2 to 1 inch of irrigation/rain. In 3 weeks you should notice the soil becomes very soft when it is moist and becomes firm again when it dries out. Shampoo is not a trick we use. Surfactants are used by professional sports complexes, but the average homeowner cannot afford those materials. Shampoo works perfect. You can overdose at 30 ounces per 1,000 and it won't hurt anything, so just put it on. If you have 5,000 square feet, put 15 ounces of shampoo into a hose end sprayer. Set the dial for any rate and try to spray evenly until the bottle is empty. Use any shampoo you can see through. Don't use shampoos with conditioners. This is a long lasting solution to hard soil. I did mine in 2012 and it still turns soft after a rain.

If you're looking for the yard of the month, you can go ahead and get a soil test from Logan Labs in Ohio. Post the results on this forum and Morpheuspa will read it and tell you what the test means, what products to apply, when, how much, how often, and where to buy the products. Look at some of the soil test topics on this forum for more information.

I would rather take over a lawn abandoned for 2 years than one that was tortured with chemicals.

I like the look of Zeon Zoysia and it does well in shaded areas. I have a few trees on one side that makes it lightly shaded. Plus I won't have to water it that much since it can deal with with the heat we have here in the south. Most yards around me are brown during winter.

I can look into renting a tractor and box but that may go out of my range. What if I tilled then used a roller afterwards. Do you think I would still be hating the bumpy mess?

I can try the shampoo. After the shampoo would you recommend the roundup, then putting down top soil and then the sod if the tractor doesn't work out?.

You didn't mention topsoil in the first message. It sounds like you might have other elements to this renovation that you might not realize are important. Topsoil is only needed if you have low spots which hold rainwater or irrigation for days at a time. If you don't need to change the drainage, then don't bring in more topsoil. Topsoil will always change your existing drainage. The problem comes if you happen to build a dam with it that prevents drainage near your house and the water backs up into your basement. I have pictures of houses where the owner has been adding "1/4-inch of topsoil every year," because someone told them to, 40 years ago. Now they have 10 inches of extra soil to deal with. If they are lucky it has been washing out.

I don't need to make a big deal out of it, but you're in the southern part of the transition zone where any grass can do well. Visit Mobile next July if you want to experience some heat. In Atlanta if you wanted a northern grass like fescue, you could do that. Fescue remains green all winter but can get dry in the summer.

Assuming the grass is adapted to the area, all of them need approximately the same amount of water to look green. The idea that zoysia or bermuda needs less water is a misrepresentation of the science. With no water at all zoysia and bermuda will go dormant and come back when it rains. On the other hand, St Augustine will die. But if you want any of them to look green, they need about an inch of water per week in the heat of summer. The only grasses that really can look green with "less water" are the prairie grasses like blue grama, wheatgrass, and buffalo grass. Those are extremely full sun types, though. Any shade at all and they will thin out to bare soil. My problem with most zoysias is that if/when it gets into trouble from heat, disease, or insects, and it goes dormant during the growing season, in my experience no matter what you do to it to make it recover, the grass remains dormant until the following April. That was not a zeon zoysia, but it is a concern. The other popular southern grasses are St Augustine and bermuda. Bermuda can look incredible with a lot of work. St Augustine can look pretty darned good with a lot less work. 90+% of all the southern lawns are St Aug or bermuda. The rest are a mix of zoysia, centipede, bahia, and buffalo.

Rollers are necessary whether you rototill or not. The roller is used after sodding to make sure the bottom of the sod is making good contact with the top of the soil.

What Tom said about the 2-step approach to RoundUp is good. I just would not rototill in between. The problem with tilling is you can never hold the tiller at the same depth. It's going to hit rocks, roots, and hard spots that cause it to buck up like a bronco. It's also going to hit soft spots and dig in deep. All that leaves an uneven subsurface that did not get tilled. When you level the surface the subsurface remains uneven. The depth of the fluffy soil in between will vary from the level surface down to the uneven subsurface. As that fluffy soil settles it will match the profile of the uneven subsurface. There are your future bumps. Pressing the soil down with a roller might help kickstart the settling process, but why go to all that cost and trouble. I would kill the surface plants as explained by Tom. Then put the sod down and roll it. Then start watering lightly several times every day to keep the top of the soil just barely moist. The roots will knit into the soil in a few weeks. Then you can back off on watering frequency and increase the depth of watering until you are deep watering about once a week. This approach saves the time and cost of rototill and new topsoil.

When the zeon sod arrives be sure everything is ready and you have the needed manpower to put it down immediately. It should not sit on the pallet too long.

You're going to be pleasantly surprised with the shampoo.