When a company/person I have hired to do xx crosses over the property line or any line I have told them not to cross or should have told them not to cross, then it is up to me to get them or someone to fix any damage.
The injured party is mad & fighting with the wrong people. IMO, it is the person who hired them that should be the subject of ire.
Has the neighbor been notified? First? Did he give verbal permission for them to do that thinking that as a neighbor you would not mind? Did the tree people know from the get go that you wanted perfection & an unrestrained baby crawled all over the front yard which you cleaned every day from the dog & cat pee, the bird droppings, the blown paper & trash that happens, spiders and other potentially dangerous insects, etc.?
From you post sequence it seem you just kept saying that is not good enough and then later you bring up the perfection & baby crawling.
I could be totally wrong but the fact you have not gone to the neighbor makes me wonder…
Agree with this. Firing that employee would not make me happy. Part of their business no doubt involves sometimes having to go onto neighboring properties and I’d rather be assured that the SOP going forward is to notify neighbors in advance and get permission. The $20? That just seems like throwing money at the problem. A small wooden birdhouse or birdhouse kit would have shown more understanding.
Speaking of neighbors, if I were your neighbor I’d be hugely embarrassed with this company and would have been over cleaning up your lawn or at least talking to you about getting the company back to clean it up. If you haven’t heard from them they don’t seem like very good neighbors.
I also agree with this, but once that post was published you would think that the company owners would be falling over themselves to fix the problem. How hard can it be to send some worker out there for an hour and rake up the mess?
Honestly at this point I would tell the company to forget it and clean it up myself. I’m not sure I’d want the pissed off wife snooping around, maybe looking to somehow “injure” herself while on your property.
I wouldn’t have anything more to do with these people. There’s something not right going on here. Supposedly they have a business with employees but they keep making excuses for not having their employees clean up the mess. They have something shady going on. In addition to the moron thing, I mean.
I would be tempted to call the truant officer if she actually brings her daughter around to do yard work. But I’d probably settle for a followup facebook posting and maybe contacting the BBB.
Take photos of the damage (if you haven’t been doing that all along). Stop all communication with them. If the damage isn’t rectified in a timely period–and it hasn’t been–hire someone to take care of it and send them the bill. Or do it yourself and invoice them a reasonable hourly rate. Say, $30 an hour.
Tree services are suprisingly expensive, yet, it isn’t that difficult to cut down a tree. The expense, as has been explained to me by a few arborists, is in doing the work neatly, without dropping limbs onto houses or cars or messing up lawns. Sounds like your neighbor hired the cheap guys and their cheap work fell on your yard. There is probably no good way to involve your neighbors but I can’t help feeling like they are partly responsible here.
I’m not sure you do. The problem is not “these guys messed up my yard,” it is “this business goes around messing up the yards of their clients’ neighbors, and then lies about fixing it.” The OP cleaning up the yard instead of complaining doesn’t fix the problem, and actually makes it worse by not giving them a chance to make it right.
There’s an argument that they might as well give up now, but that’s only because all options have been exhausted, and the other party has already indicated they have no intent to make things right.
But to just accept that life is unfair and not do what little you can to fix it? That’s what allows these sorts of things to happen in the first place. The reason the world is as unfair as it is is that so many people won’t even put in the minimal amount of effort it takes to deal with it.
I think you’ve done everything right, and your feelings are totally justified. Social media is a GREAT first way to deal with the problem, particularly when you aren’t the customer. Why on earth should you spend time sending letters and pictures to be ignored? You don’t owe them a goddamn thing. Put it on facebook, and if the company is legitimate, they will handle it quickly and you can pull the post down. If not, as in your case, they deserve what they get.
At this point I would no longer allow these people on my property. They have the hallmarks of scammers to me, and I would be wary. I would amend my online review to include how this was resolved, and either clean it myself, secure in the knowledge their business is suffering, or have it cleaned and send them a bill. You’ve been more than patient. You never hired them in the first place, and you owe them nothing.
And, as a homeowner who needs to get a tree cut soon, THANK YOU for leaving honest feedback! I like my neighbors, and I would hate to hire a moron like this unknowingly. You’ve done a good thing for the rest of us. So, anyone who tells you you wasted your time-- remember that. You helped other people and you screwed them in appropriate way. If that isn’t good work, I don’t know what it.
Even if they don’t realize it you are doing them a favor by teaching them how to do business. In the long run they willl learn the do’s and don’ts and if they pay attention their business will do better because of it.
Anybody can sue anyone else for anything. Taking the time to document the problem properly can save a potentially greater headache if the contractor were to turn around and sue you for defaming his business reputation. It doesn’t matter that the contractor is an ass and would lose his own suit.
Giant blue poly tarp, pile the detritus upon it, take the large crap off and pop it into the C&D dumpster, roll up the poly tarp with its load of small shit, pop into dumpster, call hauling company to remove dumpster. Not a problem. Any good yard crew would probably have done that.
Thirded. Facebook at the very start was an unnecessary escalation. It’s a public shaming before the owners have even had a chance to attempt to rectify the situation. If after 2-3 attempts they fail in their duty, then hit FB, Yelp, Twitter, etc.
Long before social media, a good manager taught me, a young management trainee, “praise in public, criticize in private”. Good advice that has served me well. YMMV.
And while I agree it is 100% the contractor’s fault, depending on the level of the mess, at some point it probably becomes easier to clean it oneself than to let it fester.
Yeah. Sounds like stuff you don’t want to mow over, so what do you do? Let the lawn grow out until someone finally comes by? At some point, it really has to get picked up, lest the lawnmower starts throwing rocks and chunks of wood at the house and passers-by.
You shouldn’t have started posting stuff online about them without giving them some time to clean up to your satisfaction. All you did was piss them off and from that point on they were going to drag their feet. They are totally responsible for the damage to your yard, you could sue the company for what they did, but you could have been smarter and given them more of a chance to do the right thing before you went public with it. At this point you should get an estimate to have someone else clean the yard and tell them they’ll have pay for it unless they get your yard back to it’s original condition within X days. If they don’t get it done, sue them in small claims court. I wouldn’t recommend it, but you could sue your neighbors instead.
I’d been a little upset with my neighbors for that mess too. Are you on fairly good terms with them? There is no way I’d let a tree cutting company treat my neighbors that way, and I would have withheld their pay until they made things right with you. If they didn’t, I personally would have been over there until I got your yard right.
Wait till your neighbor has his roof redone, and the wind is blowing like hell.
I think going directly to Facebook is fair. You saved the people with the $1,500 job the inconvenience of dealing with these knuckle-draggers. If companies don’t want to be publicly shamed, step one would be to perform their jobs competently and efficiently.
Why go out and clean up your home area that has been vandalized by some prick who gets paid to do it? It’s his job. He has totally disregarded a homeowner’s just plea to leave the property in the same condition in which he found it.
If the businessman caught ALS and was disabled, then would be the time to give him a pass, or if his wife/daughter was in the hospital.
There is a time to let something slide, and a time not to. This is a time not to.
BBB is worthless. Perhaps, if interested in an arm of justice, call the police department, or zoning? Some licensing authority?
BTW, OP, take pics of what’s left, and post on FB.
Also, if she mentions her children again, put a sock in it. WTH were you lecturing her?
I am with those who think you were a bit premature in posting on FB, but, OTOH, had they done right, their problem would be resolved by now.
I’ve found in similar cases that addng a few illustrative pictures with the emails makes all the difference.
I had a company replace an old roof, likethis one (ignore the snake) over a kind of porch. After they left, it turned out the roof leaked quite a bit. The bicycles parked under it got wet.
I emailed them for months to come and fix the leak. They gave it their lowest priority. Then I added some pictures I made after a rain storm, so the puddles and wet walls indicated where the leaks were. I even put chalk on the tile floor to show smaller leaks that didn’t show up that clearly in the picture.
After getting that picture, the repair guy came over the next day and fixed the problem immediately. I guess he just had assumed my problem wasn’t serious. Understandable, as many people do complain at the drop of a hat and companies will often have grown thick skin over complainers.
I’ve seen that in other cases too. When I added a self made picture of the trash left by some junkies in the alley behind our garden, featuring prominently the dirty syringe needles, the county came over to fix it right away. Pictures ARE worth a thousand words. And even more importantly, pictures don’t add to the power play, and are a great way to break up a “its serious!” -“no it’s probably not!”- discussion.
So in the OPs case I would have made a couple pictures and send them, with captions, to the company. One with the lawn superficially looking good, then with some details about all the sharp splinters. Put in your babys foor near the wood splinters and you would have convinced the company much better, then with the back and forth of what you did do.
Yes, everyone needs to be their own PR manager these days. Still, better then being your own lawyer. Or handyman. Or hired thug
You shouldn’t remove it. Businesses don’t get to do crap like that, tidy it up “at some point” and then sweep it under the rug. It doesn’t matter what they do to rectify it - it shouldn’t have happened in the first place.
Also, according to your story, the business owner said he would get it cleared up, then later, without any change in tidiness, said it looked fine. If this is accurate, it might be worth noting that at one point he did acknowledge that there was something to be done.
And where it the neighbour in all this? Did he/she not have anything to say about where all the tree gore was going?
That’s what they have Facebook for. Yeah, I’m sure they hope they’ll get more ringing endorsements than angry complaints, but it’s their job to make it that way. And any business owner with any sense would recognize that having this out in the open turns the urgency up to 11, which is why people use Facebook, Twitter, etc. for complaints.
