Gary's Service

.

The crew came when on time. They came to the door to let me know they were there to complete the job. They asked me to help them identify any sprinklers within the lawn so they could avoid them with the aerating machine. They began work promptly and were very fast. They ran two machines at once and then while one guy finished the second guy fertilized. They were super quick. Because they were so fast, I checked to be sure they hadn't missed an area, they had hit them all, but I asked them to go over a couple sections again to be sure, they had no problems with that and went over the areas again and were very polite.

They showed up 6 hours early without making any contact beforehand. My intent was to soak the lawn well before aeration, however I never had the chance and the aeration was marginal given the lack of moisture on my lawn. Then, they applied fertilizer--with a hand-held device resembling a 2-pound coffee can. One scoop of fertilizer for 1/2 acre of lawn? This guy wandered around my lawn and randomly emptied the contents of the small container and began to depart. I summoned him and complained that when I fertilize my lawn, it takes 20-30 pounds of fertilizer. He made a second swing across the lawn with a second hand-held container and left. I called Gary's secretary and complained and advised her I was going to stop payment on the check we provided until such time as the job was performed properly. Gary then contacted my wife and yelled, cursed, and threatened her. His employees returned the next day and attempted to complete what wasn't accomplished the first time. His employee confided in me that Gary is a tyrant, instructs his employees to take whatever shortcuts they could, and out of the $85 this loser collects, he reimbursed his employees $5 per yard. By the way, he recently "reinvented" his business--now called "Gary's Lawn Solutions." No doubt to escape the fertilizer trail he's earned with the BBB.

They came out to aerate and seed our lawn, but when they left I had to call them again to fix a brown patch. They flat out told me that it must be because I have a dog. They were not very helpful. I would not use them again. They call every year, but I told them I have found somebody else.

I think Gary is out of business. The website is gone and no one answers the phone.

No complaints about the lawn service, except that the list of follow-on recommended services was extensive. Big problems with the sprinkler service. I made the mistake of not accompanying the service man throughout his entire work assignment at my house, instead trusting that he did what I was paying him to do. As I said, huge mistake. The service occurred on Thursday and the service man told me my system was sched to go off next on Sat. Well on Sat, I realized that zone 1, which ran along the common walkway, was not working at all, the sprinklers didn't even come out of the ground. I had my neighbor take a look at it and he looked at the timer unit as well as the outside valves and couldn't identify the cause of the problem. He did notice however that there was a significant leak at the main valve outside. I called Gary's back first thing Monday and when I didn't hear back called again on Tuesday (funny how I heard back from them immediately when I wanted to schedule the original appointment!). I couldn't get beyond the point in the discussion with him and his staff that I had signed the receipt stating services were rendered. Becuase I had signed this paper, they wanted to charge me another $55 to just come look at the problem. I told them I was willing to pay for the cost of the repairs necessary but I wouldn't pay the $55 since these problems should have been identified during the original service call. My discussion with Gary was the ultimate in frustration and I certainly didn't feel like he valued me as a customer. When I mentioned in closing that I was going to rate him on Angie's List, he said that was OK because he already had over 3000 customers (perhaps he's overextended?!?) A few minutes later he had a member of his staff call me back and say he'd send someone to look at it as long as there was no evidence that anyone had tampered with the system since they'd been here. Well of course someone looked at it, trying to get it to work so they wouldn't have to come back out. Anyway, at this point my bottom line was NO THANKS! This is a business that I wouldn't return to under any circumstances. Lesson learned for me.

The job was done very, very quickly---too quickly. In their need to get in and out, they broke off 4 sprinkler heads. When the job was complete, "Dave" told us we should contact the company to have the sprinkler heads repaired. We did contact the company and got a run around. They said we should have marked the sprinkler heads....noone mentioned that to us or we certainly would have done it. Since we were not having any rain for a few days and Gary was not willing to do anything, my husband repaired the sprinklers himself at our own cost and canceled the check. A month later Gary called and said he would sue us since they had done the work!