River Valley Landscaping

This was a negative experience. I give him an F because my landscaping was supposed to done last September and it is still not done. I am going to hire someone else to come and do it.

The project started off okay, but we raised concerns within a couple days when there seemed to be no plan (after repeated attempts to get a picture of the patio and landscape beds, we gave up). Also, there were never more than 2 workers at our house any given day, and they were working 10am-3pm. Every week, it was the same old routine, "We'll work till dark. We'll be done by Friday." It never happened. Unless he needed more cash, or knew we were going to be working from home that day, we weren't sure James was ever going to show-up, let alone finish. Finally, some significant work was completed in October. We made the mistake of paying him most of what we owed him, even though the work was not fully completed -- we never saw him again. He left his tools scattered throughout the yard, and just took off. After a month of trying to get him to finish, we ended up hiring someone else to complete the project. We tried filing a complaint with the Illinois Attorney General, but they cannot reach him. Who knows where he is now. AVOID DOING WORK WITH HIM! Overall, here's what we learned: Read all the consumer protection documentation on the Illinois Attorney General website. Had we done this, we would have saved ourselves 8 weeks of frustration, and a lot of money. All the warning signs were there, we just didn't know to look for them. James can talk a big game, but has nothing to back it up. His "company" consists of workers he finds on Craigslist. There were a few good guys (2 of them finished the project for us), but the rest were sloppy and destructive (broken fence gate, melted fence panels, broken door frame, broken grill, damaged tree, cut wires). After tearing out our old deck, it sat in a trailer for 3 weeks before he finally removed it. The stairs on our patio were done poorly because he didn't want to/know how to make the correct cuts. We had to re-wire the landscape lighting, and still don't have it all working properly. James ran wires to our fire pit area, said he ordered lights for back there, and did nothing with it. We now have exposed wires to nowhere running across our back yard. James has absolutely no project management skills Irrigation system installed before the patio or landscape beds were completed -- damaged 3 valves and several heads when the workers ran over them hauling patio stone back. Placement of the sprinkler heads is "off" since it was a guess to where everything would be. James has NO money management skills. Every week, James was looking for "a little bit more" money. Nothing was supposed to be purchased on credit, but obviously was when the suppliers started contacting us for money -- money we already paid James. James lies and steals. You can't believe a single word that comes out of his mouth. No one was paid correctly, from suppliers to the laborers. -- We found this out after the initial dust settled. Amazingly, at the end of the day, we didn't have a single left-over paver from the project, even though there were several pallets of stone in the morning. We didn't see any refund for what he returned (or used on another project) We were told that our patio was built to exact Unilock specifications -- he never used polymeric sand that we paid for, and did an extremely poor job cleaning sealing the patio. There are actually rocks sealed into the Unilock stone. We were told that he removed fence panels to better match them with the "fence guy". In reality, him and his team melted fence panels when they burned the original deck. He said he would replace those, but it never happened. We were told we would get free lawn maintenance from him for as long as he's around. He didn't even finish the project, he thinks we're going to let him back?