We are in the process of getting our yard landscaped and have run into the pitfalls of contracts, lawsuits, promises undelivered, and a host of other frustrations. We just went to court this past Monday to settle a suit from our previous landscaper. I'm sure he does good work if you can get him to keep his appointments. We finally dropped him like a hot potato but he sued. We ended up losing due to the signed contract but at least the judge only awarded him 75% of the contract price. I guess he could see our side as well due to our frustration of getting him to come out as he promised. From now on, contracts should have a performance clause written in them. If they can't get the job done in a certain amount of time, then they should lose a percentage of the price and will continue to lose for each day they delay.
I was really happy to pay off the tree service people just to get them out of the yard. Needless to say any assurances that they give you about how they take will care of your property as though it was their own is a big lie. I know the few pots they broke and plants they buried or broke is a small price to pay, but it still is hard to look at. At least the trees are down, stumps are ground, and the huge chip pile that I worked on for a couple of weeks is spread over the backyard and some plants that were trampled are making a comeback.
Now the fence guy really has me ticked off. He's collected his money for what has been installed but he is dragging his feet on finishing up. We had ornamental fence put in for the first 200+ feet. We were suppose to finish up with wood privacy to save money, but my wife liked the ornamental so much we extended it another 96 feet (8 foot panels). He finally came up with a proposal to finish up but his original measurements and final measurements were about 100 foot off. I asked him about this and his smugness said that he could be wrong but he hasn't been wrong in over 3 years. Wow, these guys must walk on water! Anyway I measured and I was 20 feet shorter than his estimate but still more than his original proposal. So then I got to thinking about what happened. I went out and counted all the panels - there were 37 of them but I paid for 39 of them. Two panels were short but he did tell me about this - they sell you 8 foot panels but will cut them to size. So one corner panel was 5 foot and the other corner panel was 3.5 feet. They could've cut one side off six inches and saved a panel here. So where did the other two panels go? An 8 foot panel is $188.88 and a 4 foot gate is $299 and an 8 foot gate is $499. Guess what! The extra two panels go into the gates. So the 4 foot gate was nearly $500 and the 8 foot gate $700. I told him those were some expensive hinges and lockset. I have not heard another thing from him since. Typical salesman?
Any landscaping horror stories?
Wow, you have been really unlucky and these sorts of stories are enough to put one off ever hiring contractors. Mostly we've been okay, except the last guy - he sortof did the job - but not to the satisfaction of the top dollar we paid (we were more interested in quality than the price) and we couldn't get him back to make it right. Other people weren't so lucky (see link to story about the same contractor)
http://www.wrdw.com/onyourside/3913721.html
Wow, that is a scary story and I know there are a lot worse. Some contractors have given their profession a bad name. Our first landscaper thought after we signed the contract that he had us locked in I guess. He had more excuses for putting us off. The first couple of times you can usually let them slide because most everybody runs into problems. The third time was the final straw. He had his lackey deliver the plans after he proposed the meeting. His excuses that day were he was tied up on another job, then it was a printer malfunction, and finally he had to go to the hospital to get a MRI done of his brain. Most of the communications came from his secretary though which is pretty poor.
Luckily we have only paid for plans we will never use and have a fence that is almost complete but will have to look elsewheres to finish it up after assurances from the fence guy (Xtreme fence) that he could get the job done in two days - it has now been over six weeks. Our new landscaper is moving along quite nicely (we paid $7k up front for materials and 1st week of labor?) but it sure takes a lot of money to get a big job done.
Here are the pallets of stone so far for landscaping.
