Goodwins Brick Pavers

I found them to be professional, courteous, and hard working. We have a pool in the backyard with pavers around it and Mark was able to get the exact same bricks for our driveways so that everything matches. I wasn't sure how the entryway would come out, but I have to say that they did a phenomenal job. They even replaced the part of the sidewalk coming off of the driveway so that it blended better to the driveway. The quality of their work is superb and they far exceeded my expectations.

Pros:
- Punctual feedback:  The owner is courteous and quick with (texts) communication.  For the most part, he only texts.
- Expert work:  The crew is good with installation and repairs.
Cons:
 
- Punctuality:  Getting the company started and finishing the work were chores.  Jobs that should have taken a week ran more than three weeks.  Crew scheduling is part of the problem.  Workers arrive at 10 AM, break an hour for lunch and depart by 4 PM.  This makes the company labor rate excessive.
- Supervision:  The owner doesn't supervise his crew.  Instructions to the owner seldom reached workers or his subcontractor. We're living with missed assignments.  Crew members seemed diffident about responding to client requests.
- Clean-up:  Terrible.  The crew knows how to install, but not how to leave a clean premises.  We're still sweeping sand.
- Price:  Unreasonably high.  Goodwin's is the 2nd paving company recommended to us by our landscaping contractor, who when pushed admitted he didn't know Goodwin's well.  We should have bid the work, but being new to the area and trusting our landscaper, we bought his recommendation.
Bottom line:
There are better paving contractors out there.  We've used Southeastern Brick Pavers for another job, with excellent results.

THE WORK ITSELF: The final product is great. I had designed a layout and they pretty much followed my design
perfectly - - and it looks even better than I had envisioned it before the project started. I really couldn't be happier.
THE TIMING: Almost exactly as promised. The shipment of pavers arrived the day before the work started, and the job was estimated to take 5 days to complete. They broke ground on 3/11/15, and finished up mid-day on 3/18. (No work was done on the weekend, so it ended up being 5 1/2 days. In our experience with "big" jobs around the house estimated "days"
sometimes turn into actual "weeks."
COMMUNICATION: I consider proper communication a big deal. I hate contractors who communicate freely prior to the contract being made, and once the ground is broken they seem to fall off the face of the Earth. Mark, the owner, would answer any questions we had (via text), very quickly... sometimes within minutes.
PRICE: The agreed-upon price quote of $5250 was very reasonable. (In fact, he initially quoted $5500, but immediately afterwards said that he would take $250 less. I didn't ask him to drop the price, nor did I make weird noises or flinch when he said it. (Although we had had one quote that was almost $1000 lower at that point, we had another company quote us well over $11,000 for the same job. A 4th company quoted around $7500.) They did require a 50% deposit up front which I did not consider to be unreasonable given the nature of the work.
THE ONE CAVEAT... Despite the final quoted contract price, he sent us a couple of text messages midway through, and again on the date the job was finished, stating that he had miscalculated part of the work and could we see fit to add something to the final payment to cover the $485 error. In all honesty, I was pretty taken aback by this. A contract is a contract, and as I pointed out to him, *I* honored the written contract with no attempt to either cancel the job or get him to adjust the price despite the fact that I was no longer working. (The contract was agreed to prior to my leaving my job, but the work began afterwards.)
MY FINAL WORD: I would like to think that his "under-bidding" of the quote was not his standard business practice. Everyone I mentioned this to was rather aghast... and frankly, even if he had initially bid the project $500 higher we still would have gone with him. So I'll assume the request for "help" was an aberration, and give Goodwin's Brick Pavers an overall thumbs-up... with that one asterisk attached.

d

He showed us the colors of the pavers by a thumbprint size of what the pavers would be on a colored brochure with his card stapled to it.  The color is not what I had expected. I should have had him show us the REAL Pavers, before I excepted it. When I finally got approval from the homeowners A**., I called him 3 times and text him, after the 3rd. call, he answered the phone. That started to bother me. He had an excuse, but  if you are in business and a professional, somehow, I would get a response to a client within 24 hrs., that's when I check with Angie's list. I could not find anything on him-nothing good, nothing bad. So I proceeded.
Things looked liked they were going well, but we saw no supervision by the owner all day Friday when they did most of the work. The owner showed up Monday morning for 5 minutes and then left. About 10 minutes later, he texts me that we owed him $1700 plus $220.00 for freight plus tax, when we had already agreed and received an invoice for $1,700.00 total. I called him and told we were going to pay the $1,700 and he said that was OK. He left his son here to clean up and left the place around our sidewalk a mess. They also threw dirt on our new driveway without a tarp underneath all week-end. They did not clean up. They did not put the mulch back around the pavers in front of the house well. Then they put sand all around our pavers in back. I wonder if they know how to finish around the pavers. We made him re-do it with our own sod. My husband had to be out there to guide him. Very unprofessional.