We had our landscape designed and installed by Yarrow Landscaping. I am generally happy with how the mostly finished landscape turned out, however, I would never recommend Yarrow to others. The frustration that we have experienced with the disorganized team, lack of attention to detail, and poor communication has been a complete nightmare for the last 6 months. During the contract phase, we had to correct them multiple times for things that they completely left off of the contract that were clearly stated in the design. Even after construction began we were told in the middle of the project that some items were mistakenly left off and we were expected to pay for them. They did offer these items at "cost," but it was still frustrating thinking we knew what our total cost was only to have it increase in the middle of the project. Their teams were poorly coordinated, rarely worked more than half a day, and had poor attention to detail. The work is still not complete as various issues with the installation are beginning to show. The Yarrow team prefer to argue with you over e-mail about why they are not responsible for installation issues rather than meet with the customer to see and understand the customer concerns. I wanted to like Yarrow, but I did not. There are many others out there, and I suggest you look somewhere else.
Communication - Our first project leader primarily corresponded via text, but constantly lost the text messages, rarely responded to my emails, and never seemed to have an idea of when things were happening or why his team did not show up. He mostly seemed to tell us what we wanted to hear as far as timelines and status of work instead of what was actually going to happen. The second project leader came in without following up on any of the previous conversations, was passive aggressive in her emails, and simply would respond that certain installation issues were "normal" for landscaping or the best that they could do instead of trying to address the issues.
Time Management - Our project was supposed to take 6-8 weeks. We are now going on 6 months and Yarrow does not seem interested in completing our project. Sub contractors rarely worked all day or consecutive days, and even the project managers were consistently late or missed scheduled meetings.
Attention to Detail - We understand that the initial installation will not be perfect, but when we raised issues to the project managers they were not dealt with appropriately. It took the team several attempts on many of the issues as they would always try a halfhearted fix instead of fixing things correctly based on the underlying cause. Many times, we had to communicate with the subcontractors directly to get things right which totally defeated the purpose of hiring a general contractor. The edging has been particularly frustrating as we expected high quality steel edging. Instead they poorly installed the snap together metal edging from your local home improvement store. It is flimsy and crooked, and if that is what we wanted, we could have done it better ourselves.
Craftsmanship - We are still dealing with a patio long crack in the back patio. They attempted to fix the crack but within a week it has already reappeared. A crack has also appeared in our front concrete patio addition and the gates they installed are already sticking and difficult to open. The carpenter and welder are painfully slow and have terrible time management, but did a reasonable quality job, until the "sealed" wood on our benches started spotting after only one light rain.
Respect for Homeowner - One of the biggest concerns of this project was the safety of our dogs and kids. This was totally neglected and poorly planned for. After I complained many times, a partial temporary fence was put up (screwing even more holes into our house), that our dogs jumped.
Trash - Construction debris was left all over our property and in Shoal Creek including screws, metal brackets, mortar, and water bottles. Instead of addressing the problem and coming out to see what our concern was, we had to argue for weeks about the definition of debris and spend hours cleaning ourselves before Yarrow finally came to at least haul off what we had cleaned. read more