As others have said, YF did a good job when I hired them to put in a garden at my house. Things went downhill when they attempted to install a French drain. I found out well after the job was done that they don't do this often, something I would have liked to have known when they were selling me on the idea. But the problems I experienced went well beyond poor communication. At one point, I actually felt unsafe.
Initially, I thought I had made it clear why I needed a French drain: my backyard was filling up with every hard, prolonged rain. I even showed them photos and videos to illustrate the problem. One mistake I made was not to insist that their proposal say under what conditions the drain would actually work. In the end, I got a drain that didn't work at all as I had expected. The main problem was they had buried the exit point. So, during a hard rain, the water had nowhere to go once the pipe filled up. While the drain delayed flooding, my yard would again turn into a lake after about 15 minutes.
The first sign of trouble was not hearing from the company's owner when I tried to get them to make good on their warrantee. He texted a bit and talked to me once in the beginning but said he was too busy to schedule a visit and then he stopped responding to me completely. Many weeks later, during a hard rain (at which time I had to pull out sandbags to prevent water from entering my house) I called the number on the company's website. The woman who answered was hardly sympathetic but she agreed to look at my photos and talk to the owner that afternoon when they had a pre-scheduled meeting. When I didn't hear anything for 10 days, I wrote a certified letter detailing the problems and reminding them of my consumer rights under Texas law.
The same woman called me soon after I sent the letter. Surprisingly, she said the owner was on his way to my house to make a fix to the drain. What she was describing was a rather superficial fix but, more than that, she was not asking me, she was telling me. In other words, they were going to work on the drain without getting my okay. And I couldn't be there because I was on my way to pick up my child from school. I left a voicemail for the owner, pleading with him to just talk to me about the drain. He called me back and revealed, to my shock, that he had already been to my house that morning and made another (somewhat superficial) fix to the drain. He had made no attempt to get my permission to do that. He also said that he had gotten my letter but had not read it. I told him I didn't want him to make the second fix without talking first as it wouldn't have solved the main problem and involved cutting my downspout. At this point, he blew up at me and screamed a bunch of profanities. I was feeling really nervous about dealing with this person but I also wanted to resolve this. He wanted me to explain just what the problem was, not later, right then. I told him about the buried exit point. I also let him know that my child was texting me asking where I was. He agreed to meet at the house the next morning. Since I was uncomfortable being alone with him, I asked a friend to be there too.
The next day, the owner told us I was to blame for the poorly working drain because I had chosen a low-cost way to install it and that the drain was not designed to prevent my yard from filling up during a heavy rain. I let him know that was not my understanding and said it would have been good for his proposal to indicate the drain's limitations. We asked him what he could do to remedy the problem and he said he would not do any more work on my property and instead would give me back nearly all of the money I paid him. I told him I would accept 50%. He shook my hand and said he'd be sending me something to sign. I said that was fine.
Except all was not fine. When the contract arrived a few days later, it included a provision that the owner had not told us about, that the agreement was contingent on YF digging up the drain and returning my property "as close as possible" to the condition it was before the work had been performed. This would have meant severing the connections to my downspouts, digging up yards of stones, and replacing them with dirt and sod. He said his crew could do the work the next day.
I emailed the owner letting him know this was not part of our deal and that given the hostility he and the woman had shown me, I was extremely uncomfortable with his crew working on my property. I let him know that if he or his crew were to come on my property without my permission I would seek to obtain the equivalent of a restraining order. He wrote back saying that he had let me know during our meeting that he would be sending me something to sign and that these were his conditions. I let it go at that point. read more
