Your co-dwellers can only get kicked out if they fail to pay monthly payment. So he said select your 4 people very carefully. Another way to resucitate bad soil is to make the entire yard a compost pile for a year. Grow a crop of high nitrogen plants like peas, beans, clover in the yard which you will disc in when it s a foot high. Or go for a stand of alfalfa whose 30 feet long roots bring minerals up to the top layer of soil.
Peas fix nitrogen doing miraculous things for the soil.
Either way, this will give you a great, fertile yard. Wet it down, turn all this garbage once a week all autumn, winter. Plant your vegie gardens and bare root trees. You ll have an orchard. Staple-gun on plastic.