PAL LANDSCAPE SERVICES

I would avoid this business unless you have no other options. The project was delayed, and so many excuses were offered that it started to sound fishy (worker's truck problems, owner's truck problems, other clients kept adding tasks, owner needed to pick up a plant order for another job, meetings on a larger project, owner needed to attend a neighbor's soccer game). Expenses (cost of rock) supposedly rose in the course of a couple of weeks even while the excuses were being offered as to why the work couldn't get started. The finished work didn't meet my expressed needs to contain dust and to accommodate my dogs (the above-ground hoses get kicked around and I have to check the sprinklers regularly), and a concrete slate was 3" shorter than specified. Stupidly, I overpaid the final invoice despite all this, hoping to get a little more work done. I lost patience waiting for the last tasks and asked for a refund of the $61 overpayment, and the owner has avoided me like the plague since. When I finally received the refund, it was a money order, unsigned and un-addressed as required. When I called to arrange to either meet him to sign it or mail it back to him to sign it, he refused to confirm his address, called me names, and said he had spoken to his attorney about my "harassment." If he couldn't do the additional work for the amount of the overpayment, I was happy to have him just give me the extra back immediately. Instead, saying he was busy, he kept it for a month (thought he cashed my down payment and final payment promptly) and avoided responding to my phone calls and emails. To add insult to injury, he indicated that the extra work would be worth $325, though I had it done by someone else who also brought in an additional load of pea gravel (as the original rock too big [and expensive!] and the layer too shallow to contain the dust). The subsequent cost was three-quarters of the $325, and most of that was for the additional rock.