Aguilar Tree Service

Owner goes by different names depending on work location. Josh, Jamie, Jonny. I checked with the State, County and they don't have a license's nor do they carry any insurance which means that if anything happens while working on your premises it will fall on your "Home Owners Insurance". Claims on his green door flyer do be a "ISA Certified Arborist" but i checked with ISA and nothing could be further from the truth. They broke a 6 X 6 fence post while backing up the chipper and offered a new post and a bag of cement (never offered to fix it) but they never supplied them either and now doesn't answer to any phone calls. My fault for not checking if he was licensed prior to him doing the work but i was blinded by the good price he offers (this is how he sell's you). They left a real mess on the street and didn't clean it up (i had to call VDOT to get it done). There website address is non existent and they never provide a regular business or email address which in itself raises all kinds of flags. The crew is always a different one. Everything is a lie. Proceed at your own risk.

Badly. Lead crew man Josh Bacot is to be avoided at all costs. He solicits services in Hillandale neighborhood in Silver Spring. Decline!!! Large branches fell on our roof with great force (shouldn't happen!) and one of them broke our gutter. Josh promised to come back in 3 days to fix it but he was simply lying. The two times I reached him on the phone to try to get him to come back he made additional promises but he was simply lying through his teeth. Never returned my calls. The owner does not apologize or take responsibility and simply says to talk to Josh. This is after most likely paying them way too much for what was actually accomplished. In addition, it was a hot day and I was concerned for the crew. We gave the them water, bought them chipolte lunch and drinks, and tipped them excessively and this is the response we get. We trusted him to come back. Big mistake. Dishonest people.

In a word, dreadful. The first day, a crew of five arrived. Things seemed to be going pretty well. They got the brush cleared (it was very dense and covered a lot of area), cleaned up the cuttings, ran them through a chipped, and loaded them on the truck to haul away. They cleared all the way down to the dirt, which was the plan. The trench was mostly dug for the French drain, but it was far too shallow to be effective. They did some more digging the next day. Their plan was to use the dirt that they removed from the ditch to fill the low spots in the yard. This seemed like a reasonable idea, but the soil was very rocky and hard, but they used it anyway. What I have now is a lot of really ugly areas, not tamped down at all, and while the ruts aren't as deep as they were, they're irregular and ugly. I thought that landscapers were supposed to make things look pretty. They needed more dirt, so they brought more in, twice, and there are still low and unfilled areas. The plan was to till the bare dirt where they cleard the brush and spread grass seed. They brought a tiller, but it seemed the the person operating it was having a lot of difficulty. It nearly turned over once. When that job was finished, I commented that it didn't look tilled at all. I was expecting to see some dark soil on the surface and some chopped up roots. It looked no different than when he started. He said "I tilled it, but didn't go very deep." I saw one of the crew members tossing around (by hand) what I thought was grass seed, but when I looked at the receipt for it (I was paying separately for the labor and for materials that they purchased for the job), I saw that it was fertilizer. He had previously sprayed Round-Up on the dirt. When I pointed out that they hadn't put down grass seed, several days after they spread the fertilizer and weed killer, they came back with a bag of grass seed and tossed that around. I believe that the usual practice when putting new seed on dirt is to protect it with straw, but they didn't do that. They did give it a sprinkle with my garden hose, but left me no instructions about watering it. I've been following the instructions on the seed bag and watering it daily but there seems to be not evidence of sprouting after a week. The French drain was a real horror show. The ditch they dug was 12 to 14 inches deep (typical designs for this sort of application are 18 to 24 inches). They filled it with about 6 inches of gravel, then slit a piece of 4-inch non-perforated corrugated flexible pipe along its length, laid it in the trench, and then put twigs (gathered from the yard) across the inside diameter of the pipe about every three feet to keep it open so it woud catch water. They "finished" the trench with a "grate" of thin expanded aluminum lath. This is not a French drain. The leader told me that he had put in dozens like that and didn't have any complaints. I wish I had taken pictures. It wa a real hack job, and I had them re-do it using a standard design. They didn't dig any deeper, but on the second try, laid perforated pipe over about 2-3 inches of gravel, put gravel over it, and got rid of the lath. This had a better chance of working, but we'll never know until we have another one of those every-hunderd-year rains, which we seem to be getting about every other year. Once you collect water, you have to get it to someplace where it will do no harm. This involved running a pipe from the collector at the rear edge of my yard down to the street. The best way to do that would have been to dig a trench along the driveway, but they weren't equipped to do that. We agreed (before starting the project) that the pipe carrying water to the street could run along the side of the driveway, so that's what they did. The problem with this is that they made no attempt to find a clear path so the pipe could run straight down the slope without having humps and dips in it. The highest point where they left the pipe was still lower than the collector, so as long as there was water flowing, it should get over the hump. The problem is that when the rain stops, there will be water trapped in the pipe in all of the places where it dips below a high spot. It appears that by moving some stones at the edge of the driveway, it would be possible to have a much straighter run, but they didn't want to do that. There was another round of "It'll work. I guarantee it." Somehow I couldn't convince him that static water won't go uphill. The plan was to put an elbow on the perforated pipe on the end that was to drain down to the street, and make the run to the street with non-perforated pipe. Well, they took a shortcut here since there was about 20 feet of the perforated pipe left at the end of the trench, and they just curved that around and started the run down along the driveway with perforated pipe which is likely to leak water on to my neighbor's yard. They promised to change that out, but haven't returned for several days. I think (perhaps I should hope) that they've walked away and I've seen the last of them. To their credit, they did a decent job of clearing the brush and trimming the limbs, as well as filling the low spots in the driveway. It seemed that the thing they did best was dumping gravel on the driveway, but they used two, or maybe three loads. I recognized that they never really planned the job, it was all seat-of-the-pants work, and most of it was just sloppily done. I'm very unhappy. They priced the job at $2950 for the labor and direct reimbursement for materials. That seemed fair to me, however due to having to do over some of the work, I bought materials that didn't go into the final job. The tiller they got was a rental (which went on the "materials" bill) becuase their own wasn't working. A pair of tin snips that they bought to cut the lath (that we didn't use) and that went on my bill. They borrowed several of my tools from my garage without asking. At least they didn't break anything but a plastic bucket. I could have given them tin snips if they had asked. As far as payment, and where we are now, at the end of the day, I paid half the labor ($1475) plus the material they had purchased that day. That was August 24. They expected to finish the next day and I'd pay the remainder of the labor plus additional material. On August 26, they said they were done. I disagreed. They wouldn't leave without a check, so I wrote a check for the day's materials and one for the balance of the labor. They promised to be back the next day with more dirt to fill spots that were still low, and then they'd be "done." I pointed out several other problems including the perforated pipe running toward the street. On August 30, they came back, did some trivial things (I think that was when they tossed out the grass seed), and left to get another length of non-perforated pipe and more dirt, saying they'd either be back later that day (it was already about 2 o'clock) or the next day. No show. The leader stopped by on August 31 saying they had a tree to take down in the neighborhood and that they'd be back later that day if it was early enough, or the next day. That's the last time I saw them. I'm writing this on September 3. So far, I've paid $2,368. I'm probably ahead of the game if they never come back and don't sue me for breach of contract. I'm not sure what's going to happen next, but I know I won't be satisfied. I'll probalby get a real landscaper in to clean up the mess and hope that either the drain works somewhat or at least the water flow over the yard in a heavy rain isn't worse than before.

Jaime was a go-getter, knocking on my door and suggesting the badly needed pruning. I told him I was interested but was getting quotes. He stopped by a second time to follow up. The work was done well. The climbers are very skillful and fast. They did a good clean up and made sure that I was happy with the work.