Dwayne's Landscaping

Description of Work: In February I decided to hire someone to come out and plant some trees along the fence line of my property. I contacted Dwayne Shelton, owner of Dwayne’s Landscaping, because I saw that he had an advertisement in the Valpak coupon I get in the mail and that it was for $150.00 off his services. Mr. Shelton met with me on February 27th to discuss what I wanted done with the yard. We agreed that I would need a total of 9 trees along my fence line, and also wanted a few of the trees in my front yard trimmed. Mr. Shelton also suggested that I install a drain in the back yard to help with drainage. The price that I was quoted for this job was $3,500.00. I specifically asked Mr. Shelton to provide me with a written agreement for these services, but he told me that he did not use contracts and that he is a local guy and his good name was his contract. Against my better judgment, I ended up agreeing to have the services performed even though I did not have anything in writing. Mr. Shelton arrived to begin the work on February 28th. He installed the 9 trees we had discussed, but with no regard for the state that he left my yard in. He actually used a tractor to dig the holes to plant them, and drove it back and forth across my lawn. Obviously, this tore up my lawn and caused several deep trenches in the dirt from the tractor wheels. We had very heavy rains overnight, and the drain that Mr. Shelton installed didn’t work. The next morning I awoke to find my entire back yard flooded and water standing in the trenches that he left in the grass with his tractor. I called Mr. Shelton and had him come back out to repair the mess he had made of my yard. He came back out and tried to return my yard to its original state, but in order to do so he brought truckload after truckload of top soil and gravel in and tried to spread it all out so the yard would be flat and even again. He then threw down grass seed, but it was a very windy day and all of the seed blew away. Instead of the grass growing back, I ended up with a yard full of weeds! It cost me a total of $21,000.00 to have him come out and destroy my yard, then buy a bunch of materials to come out and attempt to fix it. I just ended up paying more and more for him to try and fix his botched job. Even after that, I still had to pay even more to have someone else come out and roll the yard flat because he had left it in such terrible shape that there were big clumps and divots in it.