Searer's Lawn Maintenance

It was horrible. He won’t come back and fix anything right but he sure wanted to take my money. I think it was a recommendation I got from MagicPro website. I got calls from that service recently. I have more weeds. It’s Andy Searer. He came out and I told him I wanted mostly the lawn, it was all weeds and bear spots. I had had roofing work done and new windows put in, so they were tramping all over the place and they left some stuffs lying on the grass that died. I wanted new grass and to get rid of the weed. I thought that would be like weeding, seeding and plant some new seeds. He took the machine and cut off the top layers or something that was horrible. I don’t even know how to describe it. So then he said he’d put the top soil down but it was supposed to be like leveling out because there were slopes and holes. I don’t where that went because it’s still bad. He put seed down and he put straw over it. I went out there for a month and kept watering it. I kept saying to him that we needed to write a contract so that both of us understand on what was going on. He kept lying and he kept saying that he will e-mail me one or he will get one. I told him I didn’t get his e-mail the next time he came and we needed to put this down in writing, then he told me his hard-drive fried and so on. Then I told him I was paying only the initial money and I wanted something done. He told me he don’t really deal with contracts or make them and so, I asked what was wrong with him. Then I said that this wasn’t going to work out well and I should have stopped it there but I always give people the benefit of the doubt which I know I shouldn’t do. The grass came up and so did the weeds, huge weeds and the weeds were back worse than they were. I told him I understand that grass is little but then there’s long stalk coming out of it, its weed. He told me it was the straw. The straw like, I don’t know, fertilized the thing and he told me it was a normal process for that to happen and that will die off. When I told him that he didn’t say anything about that and that I’ve been out there putting them, he said he had asked me to write this stuff down. He also said that it was normal that the straw makes weeds grow or something. I don’t know if it’s true and I have to get another landscaper to get an opinion and have somebody else come back and weed and feed or something. I didn’t get the bill or anything in writing that tells me what is the address. I am glad to give the information. I think he has a website that gives you the idea that he actually knew something about landscaping. I was surprised because I was open to some suggestions and more of a landscaping job. Every time I talked to him and when I talked to him the second time, he didn’t remember anything of our calling. He got a little smart on the phone and said he will call me back but he lost my phone number. He said he was going to be here by the end of the week, this was last week, and he came and went. Then he said his guys were there and they were knocking on the door but I didn’t answer. I don’t know if that’s true or not. It’s possible, I have field doors and I can’t hear anything with the air-conditioner and fans on and TV. I say they should call me on the phone if they were standing out there. It was really bad. I kept telling him that I wanted my flower-bed defined and they are all wiggly. I wanted a defined border and then I want some top soil in there and mulch. Then I wanted to discuss some options on what borders I could use like stone, brick. I don’t know and I didn’t know what the options are. I have a small brick home, like a cape card, like a plus on a 1000 sq. ft., 900 and something. I am in the city, not city city; I am not up there in Shermansville where there is forest and home. He kept confusing me that he could get some lime-stone borders or he could get some other kinds of borders, a rock. I told him to bring me a sample so that I know what he was talking about, what the color was and what it looks like. He told me he could bring brick but I told him I didn’t want brick as my house is brick and that I wanted something different. He kept talking about lime-stone but he wouldn’t bring me a sample, or a picture or anything of it. He then told me about mountain stone and he said it was kind of like round and base and all that stuff. I told him that would be okay, something different. I didn’t want anything flashy but I didn’t want anymore brick. He brought these, what I thought was going to be stone or rocks, boulders that are bigger than my house and it looks retarded. It’s so out of scale with the property. Now, he won’t come back and do anything to make it right and I can’t move them. I am telling you, up in the mountain around a big house with an A-frame or something, they’d look beautiful. I told him this was the reason why I wanted a sample. I asked him where I could buy it and I’d go out there and look around. He wouldn’t give me that information at all. I thought I was getting small, not like little pebble stones but like a rock that line it, not boulders that I can’t move. I don’t know how he got the boulders here. I wasn’t here or I was at work or I don’t know where I was at that time. He was supposed to edge the side-walk. The weed could grow over the side-walk again which is, when I said edge the flower-bed, I said the side-walk and all the stuff. He didn’t have enough of these borders to finish my one flower-bed. So, now I am stuck and if I don’t get something to match that one, it’s going to look even stupider. I am not happy at and how can I be happy when we didn’t what each was talking about. He said he was going to come back once the grass gets secured, gets a little higher and stuff and he was coming back to weed and feed the rime thing, harden a hair or thing. When the time came for him to come, I told myself not to bother because he won’t come back. I have been waiting since May to ask him if he thinks the boulders really looks good and everybody that comes here asked what it is. The trouble is that I can’t move them or chop it up. I lost my money. I don’t know what to do with the boulders and how I could get them hauled away. In the last 6 months of my retirement, I’ve had neck and back surgery. I had a new roof put in and I had all windows replaced. I also had to buy a new dish-washer and refrigerator because they bombed. The whole house is all tore up and I couldn’t do anything as I couldn’t move my neck. The landscaping was the last straw; I don’t plan on having anything to do with anybody till next year. They were here when they said they would for tearing up the lawn, seeding it and putting the straw down. He was here when he said he would, he had a big crew and so they did it all. It was not even a whole day. The guys that he had were very nice. I asked him if he had his hard-drive fixed, he said he did and he was e-mailing me the contract that never ever happened. The initial thing when we talked about it, I told him what I wanted and he gave me a pretty good idea of how much it was going to cost. I wrote down as he talked about what he was going to do, even though he didn’t sign it and then he said it would be $2190. I said that was acceptable of me because I was willing to spend a little more but I wasn’t going to let him know that because I didn’t know what he was going to do yet. He still kept saying he would bring a sample which never happened. He’s lying and I don’t why he didn’t want to give me a contract. Then when he got here, he asked for $1000 down, I told him it was half and I wasn’t doing that. I said I would pay him a third but I wasn’t giving him a half before he even done anything. He said it was a third and I told him that it was not and told him what I had written down. He told me that I had transposed the digits and that he had said $2920 or something like that. He said I transposed the one and nine but I did not and right there, we had a difference of $800. I am unhappy. I am retired now from the federal government but I should have just walked away. I wanted it done so badly, because I was getting a lot of other stuffs done. I thought I would be retired and I will have a nice yard to sit in and this was my plan. The last time I used somebody from Angie’s List was the roof guy that whipped me off, he declared bankruptcy and foreclosure on his home and nobody could find him anymore. The last time I saw him was on May 27th and we talked about the boulders on the phone and he told me he would make it right and he would take away the big ones if I was to tell him. I told him that I didn’t want a hole there and he told me he would actually be able to find something that would be a little bit smaller. This was in May and now it’s August. I want a job done and over with. I called him like August 1st or 2nd; he told me he would out to do the weed and that was last week.