Gibson Construction Services, LLC.

This was my worst contractor engagement in the 11.5 years I have owned this home. From the start, I didn't react to the red flags because the contractor was a referral from an associate of my realtor. When the owner, Matt visited my home for an estimate, he kept asking what other contractors were estimating instead of just giving me his pricing. I kept avoiding answering because I just wanted his pricing. I found out later from the referral source that he was just getting into landscaping and had only done minor home repairs for her. Ultimately, Matt gave me a range from $5,000 to $7,200. Again, because he was a referral, I did not push back at all and told him if he was going to address everything in the yard and make it all "perfect" I would go with his $7,200 price. On the first day of work, one laborer showed up in shorts and sneakers. Not dressed to repair the fence at the top of a steep hill. The fence repair portion of work required removing about 11 sections of fence, re-digging holes, replacing the posts with new & rehanging the sections. Shortly after, a light rain started and they cancelled the day. A couple days later, two laborers showed up and did a fairly good job repairing the fence although they left one board broken along the bottom of the fence, did not replace a couple damaged slats and replaced one pressure treated slat with a cedar slat. This became a theme with Gibson; do everything as cheaply as possible to maximize his profit margin. This first phase of the work complete, I was then introduced to the problems with this contractor. The next two scheduled start days for the landscaping were missed with no contact from Matt. Then before weeds were pulled or bushes planted they showed up and put mulch on all the beds. The mulch was applied way too deep and heavily piled up around the base of the trees. When they pulled weeds, they put them in bags and left them in the yard for several nights on the grass that I had planted several weeks prior. This killed a lot of good grass. They never did a full cleanup until the end of the job over a week later. Over the several days of work on my yard, different "kids" showed up to work and none of them ever knew what was supposed to be done from one day to the next. I ended up having to tell people what was supposed to be done. It was Matt's son, Trevor, his high school buddy, a recent college grad Wade and a young lady named I believe Renee'. So it basically was whoever Matt could cobble together on a given day and not a real landscaping operation with a professional crew. So the work was mediocre with lots of weeds left on my hill and bushes we discussed were never trimmed, but I am getting older and don't have time to perform this work myself anymore, so I asked Matt if he wanted to do a weekly service and although I was not fully happy with the work, I figured maybe it would all be worked out over time with a regular cadence. The next week when they showed up to mow, they ran over all the straw they put down over the rye grass seed they laid and it created a heavy mulch with the rains over the next week and ended up killing more grass than growing. They had also left half a bale of straw just sitting in the middle of the yard when I had the realtors coming for photos. The following week, they never showed up to mow and I ended up raking all the rotten straw up myself and packing it all for pickup. After spending all this money, I still found myself doing work that I had already paid for. By the next week, their plantings were all dead; that is within 3 weeks of completion and full final payment, the grasses they transplanted (which were healthy), the new bushes they provided and the grass on the lawn was all dead. I ended up hiring another firm which compared to Gibson has amazed me out of the gate in starting to fix the things I paid Gibson to do. The new firm said the bushes Matt chose would never likely grow where they were due to the soil and heat coming off the driveway. So I asked Matt for a partial refund and since then I never heard back from him. He offered only to replace some bushes, but I don't have time to deal with someone who provides low quality, who is unreliable and doesn't call but has no problem asking for final payment before the job is even done. I would describe Matt as a con artist, representing that he is in a business that he knows little about and is not committed to while charging the absolute top rate that I have ever paid for these services. I did not get references and I did not have my usual instinct up since he was a referral.