Mike Riley's Landscaping

My wife hired Mike Riley to perform work on our house. He started off by replacing the grass in the front yard and replacing the walkway to the front door. His crew does things in a backwards manner. After the grass was installed, he had his crew come out and installed sprinklers. I would think the sprinklers would be installed prior to the grass. The front walkway was made out of poured concrete. The concrete has some screws embedded into it. One portion even had a piece of wood wedged into it. Next, Mike's crew installed artificial turf by the side of the house. This was poorly done. The seams are clearly visible, and the turf panels were installed in different directions, leading the turf to have different colors. When asked about this, he said the turf needs time to expand and contract with an average installation time of 4 months. Next, he replaced the deck and coping around my pool. The deck was replaced with tile. The tile grout lines are not square with some areas having large gaps. I had multiple water features which were tiled over or covered with dirt. Also, some areas of tile were uneven, leading to the accumulation of water in low spots instead of leading to some pre-existing drains located around the deck. When asked about this, he said he would fix it... after he refinished the pool. Lastly, he refinished the pool. The plaster used to refinish the pool was not the same as the one picked by my wife. When I asked him to provide the invoice for this work, he refused to hand it over. In my opinion, Mike Riley is a landscaper only by his self-proclaimed title. My only regret is that I did not get involved in this project in time. After I detailed these deficiencies to Mike, he has stopped responding to any of my messages.

Mike is friendly guy who claims to have a great "eye" for landscaping ( I would argue that he doesn't). Came for an estimate & drew up a plan on the spot that looked good. However, his finished product was far from what we expected. He was incorporating new plants into our established 20 year old landscaping. When he showed up with tiny plants that could have been purchased at Lowe's, we protested. My husband went with him to the nursery & picked out new plants & a tree more in style with what we already had. This changed his price, so we scrapped having some other things done that were on the original plan. His crew didn't plant the new bushes or flowers deeply enough which caused problems immediately. After to having to continually watch over them, we finally just gave up & let them finish & leave. Long story short, we had to hire another landscaper to come in, fix everything, & replace some transplanted shrubs that didn't live a week - another $800 charge. The final straw came when the weather turned cold. The bushes planted in a prominent front bed & that Mike said would be drought tolerant & stay green all year turned out to be water hogs & did not keep their foliage - are now sticks (which with some research, I would have known & not have installed like he suggested). We'll need to have them replaced in the spring. Mike is a nice guy who wants to please his customer. However, his talent as a landscaper is questionable in our opinion.