Yesterday, the tree guys came to clean up the land I mentioned last week.
First, the guy showed up early to give us the estimate. Early as in before Joe had arrived home for the appointment, leaving me to deal with it. I showed him the land, explained what we wanted done, and he gave me an estimate, which we were quite pleased with. The estimate included 3-4 hours of "dead trees, understorage trees, ground debris" and we decided to go ahead with the work. He said it would be either last Friday or this Monday and that he'd call to confirm.
On Saturday, he left a message and Joe said he'd be here on Wednesday. But on Monday morning, Joe listened back and realized the guy had said Monday at noon. Great - Joe couldn't be here that afternoon but I said I'd handle it. When he called back to confirm, the guy said he had misspoken in the message, saying Monday when he meant Wednesday, which was tomorrow because today was Tuesday. Only it wasn't Tuesday. Huh? Finally, we straightened it out for Wednesday afternoon and Joe cleared his schedule accordingly.
Except yesterday morning (actual Tuesday), tree guy left a message saying he'd had a cancellation and would be here in 15 minutes. Awesome, since Joe had just moved all of his Wednesday meetings to Tuesday and now he couldn't be here. Again.
Anyways, the guy showed up with a crew of 5 guys, showed them what to he wanted done, told me he'd send one of them to the house for the check when they were done in approximately 2 hours, and he left. The crew worked for one hour and was done.
Except, were they done? (click for larger)
I had specifically mentioned the decades of leaves on the ground, as well as glass bottles and plastic (which you can't see in this pic) as being things we wanted removed and he had said okay. When Joe called him this morning to ask about the work done, tree guy said that it was a miscommunication because they don't pick up garbage, just limbs/branches/trees. Joe made it clear that what remained was a mixture so tree guy will come back today to check it.
My definition of ground debris:
removal of natural and foreign objects on the ground, not cleared to perfection, but at least a cursory removal (maybe a once-over with the bobcat?) to the point that we could handle the remaining without special equipment
Tree guy's definition of ground debris:
removal of most of the existing downed trees and branches, plus removal of any materials they cut down
I don't know - were our expectations wrong? The lot condition is greatly improved but we were expecting more. And while I get that it's more efficient to have 5 guys working (in theory) for a shorter amount of time, does 5 guys for 1 hour = 3 or 4 guys for 3 or 4 hours?
So we're frustrated, made worse by the fact that the head tree guy didn't follow-up at all with a call to see if we were happy with the work and didn't come by to look at the finished job himself until Joe contacted him this morning. How far would you push this? It wasn't a lot of money, but the ground debris was a really important factor in clearing the lot (it can't just be raked away - it's too deep and dense) so we may not have been so pleased with the quote if we had realized we would still have to pay to have our definition of ground debris removed.
I feel like this is my fault since I had to handle everything on this project because they kept changing times and somehow Joe wouldn't have screwed it up if he had been here.
If you made it this far, thanks. If you have any ideas/opinions/advice, thanks even more.
If you play along in your blog, please add a link to the Mr. Linky. I appreciate a link back (shiny code below if you like!). Otherwise, you're welcome to leave your six words in this post as a comment.