The English Home & Garden

Description of Work: We had a sprinkler system installed

Description of Work: Put in a new yard. Sod new plants and top soil. Seeded part of the yard. Moved trees. Designed landscape. Concrete work.

Description of Work: Wow! I have always heard all these terrible stories about contractors, and we have had a few dealings with them ourselves, but the landscaper, Ron Smith, who created our new site from scratch should write a textbook on how to do landscaping and how to please customers. It was my job to take care of ordering our new manufactured home, well my wife picked out most of the options for it, have it installed at the 55+ community that we picked out, and to have a contractor set it up, install the porch, patio, carport, shed, and walkways. It turned out pretty good. My wife's job was to select a landscaper and to work with him to establish our new outside surroundings, and I gotta say that while I would give myself a report card grade of maybe a B, there is no question that she gets an A+ for sorting through all the contractors and finding the perfect one for our landscaping. Ron actually listened to what my wife had to say, from the contractors she interviewed it is surprising how many of them just did not listen. This guy is an artist, no question about that, but an artist who works with you rather than one that forms preconceived ideas about what needs to be done. This guy is a team player. He has a crew but he is always in amongst them working too. After my wife gave the go ahead for him to get started, he was here the very next day! When I came home around 4 PM half the work around the house was already done. The landscaper and his crew was busy setting all the plants and trees where they would go, he had mapped out the whole property by the time I got there. His crew had raked up hundreds of pounds of rocks and had placed them at the north end where we needed the land filled up to the top of a block wall to level out the land, and was putting rich dark mulch around the areas for the plants. My wife came home about two hours after me and she recalls how out of the corner of her eye she noticed something was not right. Instead of the wasteland of brown mud there was now plants and trees everywhere! Within a week, I believe it was 5 days, they were finished. My wife had mentioned to him that she would like something that bordered the carport and our sidewalk where we had to turn the corner at a 90 degree angle, that if it were possible maybe he could fix that. I think she mentioned this change the second day they had started. Two days later they had finished installing a beautiful walkway at the corner with 6 inch square stones cut to fit, even a row bordering the south end of the patio and winding along to our shed entrance. It looks so good! My wife wanted something done on the northwest corner of our place where there needed to be something to be built up to allow a garden to exist instead of a steep slope. They used similar stone bricks of about a foot long to build up a wall along there several feet high at one end and filled it all in with topsoil and mulch. The mulch is unbelievable, so rich and black. I think he makes it himself and grows most of the plants and trees at his landscape business location. We had actually talked to several people who told us sod was too expensive to do, that we just needed to seed the grass or have the grass that is blown in. This guy brings in high quality sod and at the beginning he was just going to do around our manufactured home only, maybe 8 feet out or so. Instead he brings in more sod and does most of our two lots and seeds only the bottom area. It was our understanding that the second lot would all be seeded. We were not charged extra for this additional sod. How fantastic was it when we had company over for the weekend and the landscaping crew comes and layouts the rest the sod so that we have an instant yard with flower beds, bushes, and trees. Our delivery guy for UPS came to the door the next week and he was totally amazed at the transformation. It was very funny how exasperated he was and gushing over our yard. Actually that is the exact way we feel about it and have had many people drive or walk down to look at our place, and we are in an out of the way corner of the manufactured home community. I will just shut up now and say that this guy landscaped our property for a forth of the cost of one estimate, and half of the cost of another estimate and I am sure that he did a better job than either one of those contractors would have, or any of the many that my wife had contacted. She ran the gambit for sure, all the way from landscapers who never returned her calls to the landscaper who gave us an estimate as though he thought we were millionaires and totally disregarded everything she had said she wanted. This landscaper is a nice guy, listens, works hard, has an excellent crew, and cares about his customers and cares about making everything look really good, even the little details he attends to including redoing our lighted post that was at a slight angle, he fixed it! There are some existing trees up against a fence that borders another yard. He dug up and moved several of these trees so that they will give us some privacy as they mature.

Description of Work: Replaced sickly roses in a bed that is about 100ft x 2ft, then put in lovely new plants that will do better in that part of our yard. He also took apart and re-did a large difficult area of a retaining wall. He rebuilt some steps in the wall so they now sweep around a corner instead of dead ending, and are so much easier to climb. It all looks beautiful. He seems to have an artistic eye as well as knowing a lot about plants. He does all aspects of landscaping and we would definitely use him again. Honest, hardworking and good at what he does.