ABSTRACT SPRINKLER AND LANDSCAPE INSTALLATION

He has done landscaping and sprinkler repairs for us. He comes out immediately. His prices are very reasonable, and he does great work.

Charles worked with me on the design of the system, and he made sure he understood my needs before starting. He and his crew were punctual and thorough in most regards. The sprinkler and drip system was rather complex and they did a good job of laying it out, installing and connecting to the existing well. The work was done quickly and they did a nice job of cleaning up afterward. They gave me a diagram of the installation, which was very useful. After the installation, we had a couple of minor issues with the sprinklers, which they quickly came out and fixed at no extra charge. My impression is that they used high quality materials throughout. He also fixed 3 sprinkler heads that failed some months later, again at no charge. The berm ended up being smaller than the original design, even after Charles got an extra dump truck of dirt. I don't think they have as much experience at this sort of landscaping. In retrospect, I wish I had supervised this part of the job more closely. Overall: Good price, great expertise with sprinklers and drip. Maybe not as expert in hardscape work, but they will work with you to get it right if you know what you want and provide guidance.

We had this company out to our home to do spring/fall cleanup and drip system maintenance 3 times over approx 18 months. The first time was great (04/07). Charles (owner) came out and bid the job, sent 2 employees over who worked for 2 days to prune, pull weeds, haul everything away and extend the existing drip system to new plants. We paid a flat rate for the cleanup (averaged out to about $20/person/hour) and an hourly rate of $25 per hour for the sprinkler system maintenance. We thought they did an awesome job. We were beyond pleased. Too bad our experience went severely downhill from there. Called them later that year (November 07) and Charles came out again to bid the job, sent 2 employees who did half the job and never showed up again. We called him and he said he just got really busy but they would come back out to finish the job. They never did. Charles called us back in the spring but we were out of town. We called him back a month later (5/08) and he came out again. We showed him everything we wanted done, he bid the job and this time he did the work himself with one other employee. Now, if I had been home to pay him I think I would have challenged the terrible work he did but my girlfriend was there and she wrote him a check before she looked at the yard and he took off. I was very suspicious when she told me they were done after about 3 hours when before the job had taken about 12 hours. We went to inspect the work and it was terrible. Not only did he neglect to do about half of what he agreed to do, what he and his employee did do was so terrible I was in shock. They took a weed whacker to all of the shrubs in our xeriscaped yard and whacked them down to nubs. Instead of pulling weeds on the sides of the house they weed whacked them down and poured weed killer all over them. He didn't remove the old Christmas tree he agreed to remove. He didn't dig water trenches around the trees like I asked him to. He didn't extend the drip system to several new plants I pointed out. They didn't prune anything I had specifically asked for (low branches, giant rose bush). The yard looked decimated. Our neighbors even asked us about it. I really felt like he didn't want to do the job but instead of just saying so he did the worst possible work ever in the hopes that we wouldn't call him back. I felt like the fact that he had called us to ask us if we wanted work done a month earlier was strictly a cash flow issue and didn't have anything to do with actually wanting to do the work for us. The yard is finally starting to look normal again after about 6 months.

Charles originally quoted us 650.00. He then said it would be 975.00. He stated on the invoice that we needed 11.5 yards of mulch. He requested to be paid in full prior to the install. I balked and he asked for 50%. The day of the job, there seemed to be a lot of mulch left over. I found a mulch calculator online and it calculated that we needed only 7 yards. He wanted to be paid in full even though he miscalculated by 4.5 yards of mulch and had not finished the job (needed to put in edging)My husband had a talk with him and he was not expecting him to be home. He couldn't provide calculations, lied about the cost He came back another day to complete the job and apologized for the miscalculation and took 125.00 off. Considering that he worked less than 5 hours and the mulch was only 19.00 a yard, we were overcharged royally. He is dishonest, unreliable and greedy. I feel that he took advantage of my lack of landscaping knowledge and was totally caught off guard when we called him on hi