We had an absolutely horrible experience with Jake and feel completely ripped off. We also believe…read morehe took a $500 landscaping machine.
We hired Jake to revive our front and backyard. Since we are based out of Los Angeles, we were unable to ever meet Jake in person or monitor the work he was doing. We asked him to level the ground in the back, remove all dead and dried out plants, add some new plants and flowers, put grass seeds, and generally bring the place back to life and make it look beautiful.
First of all, communicating with Jake was like pulling teeth. He was very slow to reply, does not seem to know much about landscaping, and half the time he sounded drunk. Secondly, he was always postponing the work, constantly coming up with new excuses why he could not get to the site to get the job done. It was either a family emergency, or another job, or bad weather conditions, or something else. He said it would take him two days, it ended up taking ten.
After Jake told us he was done, I asked him to send me photos to see what it looked like. He sent me extremely blurry photos from very far, on which I could not make out much, except that it did not look good and very messy, you could see pots with plants that were knocked over on their sides, and random debris lying around. Still I decided to trust him since he said it will all look lush in a couple of months. We paid Jake a total of $980 via PayPal (his Venmo had been suspended, probably due to issues with other customers).
We later drove to San Diego to check out the work Jake had done. I could not believe my eyes. The backyard looked like an absolute disaster, trash and dirt everywhere, dead plants everywhere, some plants just pulled out and laying on top of the dirt, I even found empty beer cans. The ground was still completely uneven (he obviously did not touch it at all). Some new plants he bought were planted in the wrong areas, half the flowers he planted were already dead since we believe he broke all the sprinklers in the back (we kept asking him to check the sprinklers to make sure they all work and water the new grass seeds he put). Every time he said he would take a look, but never did, then acted like they were already broken, and kept coming up with new excuses why he could not go and fix them (we were even prepared to pay extra for them). The first thing a good landscaper should do is make sure the watering system works! I can't comprehend how the place was supposed to look lush without water.
On top of everything, we had a $500 rototiller machine in the backyard, which disappeared after Jake started coming around. He was the only landscaper we gave the lockbox code to, and the only person working in the back who would even use such a machine. When we asked him about it, he said he will check with his employees, so I'm not sure who was even working in our yard.
Jake completely took advantage of the fact that neither of us were around to check on the quality of his work. Even when we arrived in San Diego, he was supposed to come over to fix the sprinklers, but when I told him I was there and would wait for him to speak to him in person, he said he did not want to face us directly.
After a month of back and forth, $980 out the window, and having a $500 machine disappear, we have to start all over and hire someone to do everything from scratch. I urge everyone to stay as far away from this amateur landscaper and not let him anywhere near your yards and gardens. I am attaching photos of the backyard after Jake was done with it, please judge for yourselves.