Prestige Landscape

Buyer beware... Let me start by saying that we met with Jim Pike, the owner of Prestige Landscapes out of Parker - and he is very personable and likeable, so this review is hard for us to write – but it is an honest account of how things went and ended on a sour note. After a year and a half of the project and subsequent follow-up trying to get Jim to complete the job (with him going dark for months at a time despite near weekly calls or texts from my wife and I), we now understand he doesn’t intend to actually complete the job or refund us for the overpayment. Throughout the project, Jim had trouble keeping good help on staff. He also had trouble hiring enough staff to keep up with his committed projects. This meant many delays to our project and likely the reason Jim isn’t responding to us to finish the job. However, it also meant that Jim came to us several times asking for an ‘advance’ on payment prior to him completing the work. We felt bad for Jim, so we agreed and cut checks early to help him. The first was an advance of $3,500 against the final milestone (project completion) and the next was another advance of $3,000. Near the end of the project, when we did the final walk-through and we created a list of the outstanding items (punch list) that he agreed to complete the following week and he asked for the final check. There were dozens of items on the list, so my gut told me not to give the final check until the list was complete, but again we felt bad for Jim with the trouble he had keeping good talent and we went with our hearts trusting he would do the right thing and complete the work. Now after so much follow-up (and I mean hundreds of calls and texts), we’ve sent some final texts to Jim offering to give him a few more weeks to wrap it up. He provided us with no response to that, so I made final call with voicemail and text to let him know we are taking his lack of response as he is choosing not to finish the work and explained that we would in-turn be posting some honest reviews online so other buyers would be aware of his business practices with our project. He didn’t respond once to any of our last 15+ texts or voicemails between the end of June and this week, so it looks like we are just stuck with the laundry list of remaining items and also having over-payed by $500 for it as is explained below. In summary, I want to reiterate that we really do like Jim ‘personally’ but professionally we would just say use CAUTION if engaging in a contract with him. I would strongly suggest not making the final payment until ALL of the work is complete. I would also strongly suggest not providing any requested ‘draw down’ pre-payment checks as that lessens the final amount he is expecting and may get to a point where he is comfortable walking away from that last check and not finishing the job to go tackle his newer projects with more dollars. I really wish things had ended on a good note, but this is the reality of their work product in our case. This is a summary of the ‘punch list’ that is still outstanding 1.5 years later… • A few small boulders. We found that the final amount on the bill he gave us was actually $500 more than the actual bill should have been (we checked it after the fact unfortunately so too late). When we discussed this over-payment with Jim, he said he would provide us with several small boulders for that $500, so we agreed to that instead of getting the cash back. The boulders were never provided however, so we actually ‘overpaid’ for the back yard on top of not getting the work completed. • Attaching the deck to the house. Believe it or not – the deck rails still are not attached to the house, so they are loose / can’t really lean on them. • Power washing the deck as he had used some pretty beat up posts, but said they would clean right up when they power-washed them (and he said they would wash them) • Leveling the stairs on the deck which were on an angle/slant • Fixing several cracks in the stamped concrete • Adding more pathway gravel to the long walkway as it had settled • Fix a sprinkler zone that his guys had broken while troubleshooting (we had to manually water this zone last summer and this summer until we finally paid someone else to repair it and found that they killed that zone on our master programmable system) • Add felt and rock on one side of the house that he recommended we wait on until the fence was installed, but then never got back around to addressing • Seed the part of the yard which didn’t receive new grass with natural grass seed for the local area • Move some shrubs that were installed too close to the flagstone • Build a wood box for the propane tank for the fire pit (which he later said he would plant a large grass in front of instead to hide it, but then they just planted a small flower which didn’t cover anything) • Finish burying the hose in the yard (for watering the trees and shrubs • Add a sprinkler to the new lawn that they installed as there is a large section that the watering doesn’t cover. This area has since died as we haven’t been able to keep up with all the manual watering – although we tried… • Finish burying the wiring for the outdoor lights as many places still have wires above ground • Fix the drainage in the large garden bed platform they added, as water pools in the lower right and has created a sink-hole in that spot • Fix the drainage in the yard as it doesn’t have slope to run the water away from the patio / house so the water pools there and caused the basement to start flooding. He did come back with this specific issue about 3 months ago, and cut in an additional drain. That fixed the water backing up in the window wells and spilling into the basement. However, it had created a very large mud pit in the yard next to the patio and he said he would come back and replace that grass and re-do the slope in the back yard so it would route correctly away from the house, patio, and fire pit. He never came back to do this however after at least 30 follow-up texts and calls from us over the past few months. • Fix the drainage in the fire pit. This sits lower than the patio, so with the poor slope, this fills up with water every time it rains. They created a couple of small holes in the low side of the fire pit for drainage – but the holes are too small and the ground outside the fire pit is too high, so it doesn’t drain. He said he would fix this when he came back to look at the overall drainage issues, but again – he never came back to do this. • Fix the fire pit flame as it is adjusted to a small amount of flame, and should be able to go much higher for a proper fire. It works, but the flame is very low. He said it was adjustable, but the adjustment is directly under the center / top of the fire pit and there is no way we could reach it to adjust it after several attempts. He said he would come back and adjust it, but did not – so we have a very low flame fire pit as a result since they put the mesh screen under the top cemented flagstone – so there is no way for us to actually adjust it. The punch list was actually longer than this, but he did come back a couple of times to do one item or another, but never to complete the full list or to really effect much change. He did however replace one dead pine tree. That tree had a damaged root ball when they installed it however, and he explained that he had to plant it and let it die before he could get a replacement from the nursery. So, we had a dead pine tree for about a year prior to it finally being replaced.