VIP LAWN CARE & LANDSCAPE CONCEPTS

The name of the gentleman is Angel Villanueva, not the name listed with the company phone number. When I asked for a bid, he came and looked at the yard and gave me a price. He said the price included front & back cutting of grass, tree-hedge pruning, weeding and fertilizer. He is young and disorganized. He works hard and he tries hard. For whatever reason, he can't seem to pull it together. Our yard is going to take some extra $$ and work to get in order after putting it in his care the past 6 months. I now have to pay to have the trees trimmed properly, flower beds weeded and hedges, bushes trimmed. I wish I could attach pictures. There are dead plants by the front door, I think he sprayed with weed killer. Everything he was paid to do, I now have to pay someone to do over correctly. Definitely a case of Pennywise and Pound Foolish on my part. All the RED FLAGS were there to stop using his services. I thought with a little patience and coaching ('cause of his youth) that I could get him to reliable. I was wrong. This guy is NOT a landscaper or a tree trimmer. Can he cut & edge the grass...maybe a yes, only if you think he can't hurt anything. Anything else=NO. Unreliable: For weekly service from December-March he failed to show up 5 times. I lost count of how many times he rescheduled because he was too tired, sick etc... To make up for the missed weeks, he provided service free of charge for April. He missed one week there. We finally stopped paying him at the beginning of the month (ahead of the work) and told him we would pay him at the end of the month since we were not getting the services we had payed for. He is extremely punctual & reliable when it comes to billing and asking for $$$ upfront. DO NOT PAY HIM UP FRONT. Pay him when you are satisfied with his work. He started off with all the "extras" the yard needed so he could get it to where it is easily "maintained." We gave him a beautifully landscaped yard to start with. All he had to do was maintain it. The extras took from December-February. Tree trimming, mulch & SOD. Angel knows absolutely nothing about tree trimming. We could have hacked away at the trees ourselves the way he did. Trimming trees is about thinning them throughout, not hacking away from the ground, which is what he and his help did. Pulling out existing plants from the planter in their wake. He actually left a very large, heavy, half sawn branch in our olive tree. During the Santa Ana winds it fell down. We were lucky it didn't kill someone. Very dangerous. He never completed the mulch, kept saying he would take care of it, he never did. A week after the SOD install, one of his helpers cut the SOD too low (to the dirt) and it burned. Angel offered to replace it, he never did. Once we got past the extras, I waited to see how the "regular maintenance" was going to go. I was beginning to think it was all about the "extras." but I gave him the benefit of the doubt. Three weeks ago, he trimmed one of six rose bushes & left the rest unpruned. They are all in a row, so it looks ridiculous. Same with the citrus trees, he trimmed one and left three untouched. He stated he would get them the next week. The next week came, he didn't complete the pruning as promised. He said he would come mid-week to complete, he never came. There are weeds one foot high in the flower beds that he walks past week after week. When I complained about this, he sent a text stating he was raising his fee 41%. I declined stating if he wasn't reliable at his current price, we doubted a 41% raise would change that. This has been a very frustrating experience for us. We gave him every chance to be successful. We tolerated more than we should have, thinking he would pull it together.

After getting the last portion of money that he asked me explaining that he really needs them to finish the project, he disappeared and did not complete the job.