US Lawns, York PA

1. The partial new lawn was planted and went well. 2. The complete new lawn was planted and did not go well for the following reasons. a. The lawn did not slope gently from the house toward the back of the lawn and creek as we were promised. b. Not enough topsoil was used, which prevented too much of the new seed from growing like it was supposed to. c. The topsoil wasn't appropriately screened, which was indicated by the two-inch rocks I kept pulling out of the yard. d. Not enough follow-up care took place by the company; I ended up doing a lot of seeding and putting down topsoil on my own that I thought the company should have done. When I requested the company either do so or refund one-third of my money to make up for the time, effort, and expense that I believe I was putting into my yard the company stopped communicating with me. e. Keep in mind that this company just recently started working asa franchise of US Lawns, and probably for good reason; it had been working as Sullivan Nursery and Landscaping. In fact, its primary web site, still makes it look like it is still Sullivan Nursery and Landscaping instead of US Lawns. Something is really off about this company. f. Management does not follow through with what it says it will do. I took off work for both the lawn portion and tree portion and was glad I did. The person with whom I set up the work said she would be here for the work but then wasn't here for the seeding. If I hadn't been here, they were going to just fill in the lesser grassy areas with soil and seed instead of completely taking out the old lawn and putting in a completely new lawn as agreed upon and how the job had been priced. g. The foreman on the job understood this, fortunately, and he made sure the entire old lawn was removed. Unfortunately, this still didn't prevent them from not using as much topsoil as they should have. At one point, I had a small pond in my yard. All they did was come in and throw more soil and seed down. I again had to go through all the same steps of care. They never checked to make sure everything was okay. h. At one point the manager, with the lawn care guy from a lawn care company did come and look at the lawn with me. He just said that all the weeds were supposed to be there. I disagreed as the seed was supposed to be 99% weed free. i. One of the issues with trying to get out of completely removing the entire yard was that they didn't have a piece of equipment that they should have. I said that wasn't my fault. They came back the next day after finding and renting the piece of equipment. Also, they didn't realize that an area in the back yard where a swimming pool had been had plastic under the sand to prevent weeds from coming through. This seemed to be an issue that they tried to blame on me. Again, I said it wasn't my fault, that I had hired them as the expert. If this was going to be a problem it was up to them to tell me. 3. We had planned to plant the trees at the same time. This was fine until I took a good look at the trees and saw that one was not healthy, and I would not accept it. Again, I was glad I stayed home. a. When a new tree was delivered, I took off work to be here for it to be planted. The tree that was almost planted was not the correct one. It was not even the same leaf type: simple vs compound. b. Thus began the wait to get the final tree planted. c. Finally, a month later, we filled the hole with a tree. d. A year later, I am hoping that tree gets leaves. 4. A subcontractor removed the three trees with no difficulty. 5. The grade is a C, which is an average of an F for management and administration and an A for the team that did the actual work on the lawn here at my home. 6. The price is fair if the work had been done according to contract. For the work that was done, the price is badly overinflated. 7. I contacted the Florida US Lawns home office, which, with Alex Cistone of Sullivan Nursery, worked with me to resolve the issues I detailed here. As a result of our discussions, I have upgraded my overall rating to a B due to everything being satisfactorily resolved.