CLIFF MILLER LANDSCAPING

Good start, but got slower and slower. Got one story and excuse after another. Finally fired him.

Early on when I was talking to him about the concrete work, I could tell that he didn t really know what he was doing. I was describing as it comes down the alley from our front gate there is a slope. I asked him what he would do when he got to the gate. He said that he would cut the bottom of the gate off. I told him no that he s not cutting the bottom of the gate off. He said that they could raise it up and I said no, I don t want it raised up. He finally got his concrete person over and they weren t going to be able to start until a week later. When I first talked to him, I asked him how long it would take. He said it would take tow weeks. The implication is that they would be starting next week. We called them and told them that we had someone else to do our concrete work and he said that was cheaper than what he could do it for. He said if you can get it done for that to go ahead. They built a concrete patio for us also. We were asking them if they were going to credit us back for the back patio. We kept asking him for a break down and he would show up at the job and tell us that he didn t have those figures yet. He would start in on something. He finally shows up with something. We had talked about possible lighting and my husband told him to give us a breakdown of the lighting. So, he shows up with a break down of the lighting and nothing else. We told him that we need to know where we are and that we can t afford to this right now. It was probably another four days before he came back with a second break down. At that time he gave us five hundred dollars for the patio and composite deck. It was also four aspen trees that were a hundred and seventy five dollars apiece. He also gave us our money back on the walkway. He didn t leave a copy of the breakdown. He came back five days later and he increased the flagstone check to eight hundred. We didn t do our homework like we should have. We met him at a home show and we felt a little more secure that he was there. We called the Better Business Bureau and he had only one complaint. We thought that wasn t bad. No that I look back I think it s really bad for that one complaint to be on your record. We paid fifty percent up front and then another twenty five percent halfway through. I didn't know that my husband had paid him a thousand dollars ahead of time. I had a hard time with him not giving us what we needed as far as the break down. He finally finished and on the day that he was finishing he called my husband out to check. I told him that I would write him a check but that I was holding back three hundred until all of the debris was picked up. He started yelling at my husband and flipping him off. He comes across as a little boy but really he's a crook. This is a pattern of his. After the project was completed the owner Cliff Miller cashed a returned check on our credit card account and was paid an additional $4000 that he was not in titled to.

Do's and Don'ts: Do set up the contract early and go over the details ahead of time. Ensure your expectations are well known and understood. Get it in writing. Understand the payment requirements up front. How much down, how much during and how much when complete and the time table for each. Don't provide full payment until the job is complete. Withhold the last 10% or whatever you believe is fair until the whole job is completed to your satisfaction and tell the contractor that upfront. Any good contractor will agree and this won't be a problem. If they refuse, I recommend you look somewhere else.