When we recently bought our first house, it didn't come with a back yard -- and we'd just moved from a city where nobody had yards, so we were the perfect storm for a landscaping contractor's nightmare: Very interested in the details but completely ignorant ("what do you mean, there's more than one kind of grass?"). We have your typical suburban back lot: not especially big, but we didn't want a ton of grass to water, knew we wanted native plants/xeriscaping, but barely knew what that meant.
We solicited bids from a handful of landscaping companies. At first, we weren't sure if it made sense to hire Scott from Green Castle, since we didn't know that we needed a general contractor to supervise the plan. Green Castle chiefly did counter tops, too, and we were skeptical at first about going with a landscaping contractor who didn't have a lot of landscaping contracts under his belt. So we were up front with him: get us a good price and stay on top of things and we'll stick with you. Boy are we glad we did.
I was present during most of the work, and the landscaping company we ended up using was reputable -- but there were still small things that Scott made them do a little bit differently. When the irrigation company didn't coordinate with the landscaping company and threw a fit over the schedule not revolving around them, Scott handled it for us, going so far as to pull up 400 square feet of sod on his own to appease the irate irrigator. When that was done, he decided that the metal edging we'd been using elsewhere didn't look good around the section of grass in the plan, so he went out to Home Depot on his own time (and his own dime), picked up a truckload of edge stones, came out one Saturday morning at 6:00 AM, and spent six hours laying them down and pounding them in. He did this because he wanted to be proud of the job and show it off (as his company mostly does counter tops) and he was spot on about how much of a difference it made.
Finally, we're not the easiest customers. I run a small business and try to make a dollar go as far as it can, and having no experience with remodeling or landscaping, it seemed like general contractors could be a gamble. As it turned out, not only did Scott get us better prices than we were able to find on our own, but he was honest and reliable (and patient with our many questions). For example, there were some questions that came up about particular types of plants or certain types of irrigation where Scott admitted he couldn't give us an expert answer -- but he came back the next day after learning everything he could about whatever the question was and gave us a recommendation he was willing to stand behind.
We'll gladly go with Green Castle again down the road! read more