Kelly's Greenscapes

Terrible. 100% of the work had to be redone and replaced by another Landscaping company at our great expense.

1. We contracted and purchased an NDS underground drainage system. When the second landscaping company came in to redo everything – we discovered that our gutters were simply buried underground and there was in essence NO system in place. Our sump pump had a 10’ solid PVC pipe attached to, buried about 2’ underground that that ran along the side of our house that simply ended in dirt. No net, clean out, day light, no French drain, no NDS system – nothing. We feel blessed we discovered this or we would have eventually had 4 sink holes in our yard and a sump pump that would have backed up into our home. When we discovered this – it was a mouth dropper.

2. Concrete work was rough. Inexperienced crew. The sidewalk along side our home was not parallel to the house and drifted approximately 12” from back to front. The hand cut expansion joints were “eye balled” and not parallel with each other. The turn of this sidewalk into our patio was at an odd angle – not 45 degrees as per plan – and hard on the eyes. The carriage walk to our street was originally formed “off/unparallel” with the top at 36” width and at the street 34” width. I caught this before they poured. It should have been my warning as to how bad this crew was.

3. The Polymeric sand was installed incorrectly. On every instruction I’ve seen, paper or web, the critical step #3 states that the excess sand should be removed from the stone with a leaf blower before you wet and activate the polymeric sand or you will stain the stone. This step was not done and yes – all the stones were stained – and it looked awful. The stones looked dirty and oily. The owner of Kelly’s Greenscape attempted to clean the stones – but with no success. In addition, sprinklers were set on the newly seeded yard at the same time – not allowing the polymeric sand to “set” properly leaving many places where the sand came out of the joints.

4. The stones originally used in our front stoop were the broken, tossed stones from the two patios. We believe he only order “just enough”. It looked awful. Kelly’s Greenscape did agree and came to replace “some” of the stones. However, we had a brick pattern using half 4x4 bricks and half 4x8 bricks. In his “redo” he only used 4x8 bricks – not following the grid pattern of the stonework. Between the polymeric sand not applied right and the brick pattern not followed, this was a horrible eyesore right out our front door.

5. The crew did not clean the yard before applying the topsoil and grass seed. After 2 lawn sprinklings, a tremendous amount of gravel surfaced. Most of these stones were 1” in diameter or larger disbursed throughout the job by their trucks and bobcat. All of the planting beddings had the overflow of crushed stone topped with mulch. When I went to garden, I found NO dirt for the plants.

6. The berm was created with mostly waste dirt from the demolition phase. The berm was excessively high and rolled over 12”-18” into my neighbors yard. The crew had not marked the lot line. When they came to correct this problem after the neighbors politely complained to us – they simply “cut” that side of the berm away and refused to lower the berm to an appropriate height or re-sculpt the curve of the berm.

7. I had ordered small Technito Arborvitae and found out from the 2nd Landscapers that what was planted where Techno Arborvitae which would grow large and not to the scale we were looking for.

Not only did we verbally complain, we wrote the owner of Kelly’s Greenscape a letter at the conclusion of the project stating all that was wrong and what we wanted corrected before we made final payment. He refused and stopped communicating with us. We have had to take Legal action.

We agree with the other negative review of this company. We had a brick patio installed, a back stoop and steps, a raised stone herb garden, and a new sidewalk. Most of the hardscape work was done fairly well, although we had to have them back several times to fix issues with the stone work. The rest of their work turned into a nightmare in slow motion. The extensive areas that they tore up in the hardscaping process were never properly restored. They had to come back several times to add topsoil and reseed. Its a large area that required a lot of watering, and when it did not grow and they had to come back, more watering was required. Its still very patchy in many areas. After repeated phone calls and site visits, many of which required me to leave work, I basically gave up on them in this aspect of the job and this past week added a lot more topsoil and seed myself in a particularly bad area.
A second area of poor work was general installation and cleanup practice. As mentioned the job included a fair amount of stone work. They sawed the stone on site and got stone dust everywhere. They made no attempt to shield things like the bushes, house and grill from being covered in dust, nor did they try to clean it up. When we complained about the house being covered in dust, we were told they would come back and clean it. All they did was spray the house with water which was inadequate. Now when you look at the side of the house you can see the zigzag pattern where the water hit it and the rest still has embedded dust and may need to be repainted. We also learned later on when planting perennials in one of the new garden areas that they buried two railroad ties in the ground as fill, rather than removing them from the property as planned. The latest irritant came this week when I was cleaning the patio doors by the stoop they installed. They installed brick and used the stabilizing sand which they activated with water. The overspray from doing this apparently got on the patio door trim and windows up to a height of about 24 inches. The resulting silica residue adhered very strongly and had to be scraped and scrubbed off in a process that took a couple of hours. Bottom line is good hardscape, poor cleanup and follow through resulting in headaches to this property owner.