Short Form:
Cosco Landscaping did fine masonry work, but only so-so fence work. Like many contractors, we had to push them on details they would have rather ignored. They added charges to the final bill without warning. When we disagreed with the charges, Domenic escalated to name calling and threats of property damage instead of listening to what we were saying.
Longer form:
We hired Cosco Landscaping to install a new curb cut, driveway, patio, and fences on our property.
There were many of the small frustrations and corrections that I expect in dealing with contractors, but they were generally resolved. Eg: The patio was first installed as larger than the size on the diagram. They kept not putting fence posts places where the fence was going to turn. They didn't put the requested pattern of brick on the patio. Most of these were resolved when pointed out. It felt like Domenic was not good at listening to the details we thought were important, and instead wanted to try to make the space roughly match what he thought we wanted, without asking when he was unsure what we wanted.
The brickwork on the driveway is nice and was relatively quickly completed. There were delays in the fence install, and the final work was not done until October after starting in July.
Then the final bills came. There were over $1k of extra charges, which hadn't been mentioned until the bill, for things that we felt were in the original contract.
For example, one charge was $650 for cobblestone edging. Domenic argued that the contract said "plastic edging", but the contract said "edging". We had had discussions on edging both before and after signing the contract, including how we would want stone, and Domenic never said anything like "that will cost about $600 extra", or told us that he hadn't included that in the contract.
Domenic's argument for why we should pay appeared to be that he had costs he didn't include in the contract so we should pay them. He didn't argue that he had told us about these costs and what they would be, or that he couldn't have anticipated them and included them in the contract. We felt this was extortionary behavior.
I tried to express that we were surprised by these charges, had been under the impression this work was covered by the contract, and expected "extras" to have had their prices disclosed and discussed while the work was ongoing. Domenic reiterated that he had spent money so we should pay for it, then, while sounding progressively more angry, escalated to implying I was naive, calling me unreasonable and difficult to work with*, and threatening to come onto our property and rip out the work he had done. By the time he made this final threat, he was angry enough that we thought there was a real chance he meant it.
We offered to pay half of the charges, even though we thought they were not reasonable, because we were clearly not convincing each other. Domenic refused this. He did not offer a counter solution. (He did agree to go so far as to drop $350 of the $1280 extra charges, and claimed that this was a fair compromise because there were four line items and he was dropping two of them.)
In the end, we decided to pay his roughly $1k extra bill, because we were tired of fighting with him.
*When asked, the only specifics he could cite for why I was difficult to work with were that I took "15 minutes" to make decisions, and that I didn't tell his crew they had the patio size wrong, ie, different than the written diagram, until after they had laid bricks.
Note: Since many of Domenic's responses seem to be read Angie's List, I think it's worth mentioning that I have submitted a similar review to Angie's List. read more
