Lawns by Don

I really wanted to leave a nice review; however, I can't. The good points - The Mulching was done and turned out well for the most part (they mulched over my wife's newly-planted ground cover in one area) - The branch we asked to be removed was removed (albeit, clumsily at best) Don is a friendly guy who seems to care about the quality of his work --- until it affects his bottom line. With that said I will get into the rest. The time quoted for the entire job was 3 days. A week later, it was still not done. The consistency of the workers to show up was laughable. There was one day where the guy showed up for 15 minutes around 9 am, walked around the yard once and mysteriously left. He returned at 4:00 pm -- mulched for about 30 minutes and left for the day... which explains how this job ended up taking over a week. In fairness, some of the days the temperature reached 90 degrees, but I would kind of think that practitioners of lawn services would be accustomed to this. The whole time that the job was 'in process', they parked their ATV in my driveway. Normally, this would be fine, except the ATV ended up leaking oil all over the place and stained my once very clean concrete driveway. Upon being notified of our displeasure with the mess, Don did try to clean the driveway with remedies he found 'off the internet' to no avail. Upon expressing my displeasure with the situation, I asked Don to knock some money off the total - $100 - nothing crazy so I could recoup some of the cost it will take me to clean my driveway. Don offered to pressure wash it; however, I was disinclined to do so when he informed me that I would have to give permission to him, essentially a waiver to absolve him of liability, to pressure wash my driveway. I declined this as the quality of his company's work thus far did not fill me with confidence that this would turn out well. He refused to take any money off the original agreement. (There had been 2 quotes floating around at one point... one from Don, and another one from his son that increased the price of both mulch and labor). We had to call Don up to 'correct the mistake', which was obviously shady. So, father (owner) charges one price and then worker (son) attempts to charge another (higher) later in the process. When discussing the driveway incident, Don then goes on to tell me that he has already discounted our job and he can't give a dollar more... then cites the snafu between the difference in prices between the two earlier quotes as the 'discount' he had afforded me. It was the price in the original quote before the son increased the price for no reason. He then when onto say that he had underbid the project and gave 2 square yards of mulch to me out of his own pocket. This is obviously purely anecdotal as this is the first I'm hearing of this extra mulch obviously. We went over the driveway issue one more time in which he conceded that they did in fact stain my driveway and that he was not going to financially compensate me for that by taking money off the price as he was already making little off this transaction. I ended up paying the full amount... for now. I fully expect to see old Don in small claims court about the driveway. In summation - I gave the quality of the work a C... the mulch is actually good, but seriously, it would probably be hard to screw up mulch work. The time it took to complete the job and the accidental destruction of the ground cover knocks the score down. The timeliness and professionalism, or lack thereof do as well. Use at your own risk.