Schoch Home Maintenance & Landscaping

We found this company via word-of-mouth and its "Business of the Month" status at KeyBank on Delhi Pike in Cincinnati. The "he" referred to in the following report is the owner and the one who does (or sometimes does not, as you will see) do the work. We initially contracted for some yard work and debris hauling in our back yard. We paid him a check for $592 on 4/27/10. He said he would return to complete the work the next week. He did not. After weeks of nagging, he finally promised to finish the job on 6/14/10, the day he returned from vacation. He no-showed again. He didn't complete the work until 6/30/10, and this was only after weeks of us calling and bugging him. On 6/30/10, we paid him a check in the amount of $205. This covered some additional hauling of yard debris, the grass cutting from earlier in June, and the next grass cutting which he promised to complete "...before the July 4th holiday." The owner's record keeping had already been shown to be suspect in our eyes. He never seemed to have his calendar actually with him, so when you told him dates, you almost knew he would be late or not show up. We should not have paid for a cutting that had not occurred yet, but we did anyway. As predicted, he did not show up to cut the grass before July 4th. Our house was on the market at the time, so it was imperative that the grass be kept tidy. My wife and I called him several times, but he did not return our calls. I finally got him on the phone on 7/10/10, and he did cut the grass the next day. As you will recall, we had already paid him for this cut. By early August the grass and weeds were quite high and needed to be trimmed. Again, he ignored our correspondences throughout late July and early August. My wife left him a voicemail on 8/9/10 complaining about his shoddy service. Magically, he appeared later that day to perform a cut, with nary an acknowledgement of his poor business ethics. Today (8/26/10) he showed up to cut the grass again. We owed him for the cut on 8/9/10 and the one he did today, for a total of $80. He demanded $120, claiming he cut our grass "...sometime in late July on a Tuesday morning when you were not home." When I asked him for a specific date, he claimed he did not know but "...it's written down in his calendar at my house." He also said the reason he had not responded to our many calls was that he had "...lost my cell phone and all the contacts in it." This sounded highly unlikely to us. I knew he was purposefully misleading us because we kept a daily watch on the backyard grass from 7/11/10 to 8/9/10, and it was NOT cut. We paid him $120 regardless and told him he was wrong. We said we cannot keep paying for services not rendered, and terminated our contract, essentially just paying for him to go away and to avoid further issues. He is to be avoided for any lawn care needs. The moral of the story: 1. Don't pay for services until they are completed. 2. If your contractor doesn't respond to your calls or no-shows, find a new one. 3. For lawn work, insist your contractor keeps good paperwork and is transparent, otherwise you may be asked to pay for services that were not rendered.