Crawford Landscaping & Design Inc.

We were forced to fire Mark Crawford/Crawford Landscaping due to lack of performance & general incompetence. We had a backyard project that needed to be completed in just over 6 weeks’ time. Mark assured us that he could meet this schedule, and that he would start immediately on receipt of our down payment. So, we gave him the down payment --- and he promptly disappeared for 4 weeks, and no work was started. Once the project work finally did start: 1) Mark did not ever supply enough workers to make any significant progress on the project. We believe he had more quantity and quality of workers available, but was instead giving other projects a higher priority. 2) Mark repeatedly allowed unskilled workers to attempt tasks requiring specific skills, leading to excessive tear-out, re-work, and materials waste. 3) Mark did not personally supply nearly enough oversight/guidance to assist his workers, leading to numerous errors requiring re-work. 4) Due to all the mistakes being made from lack of supervision & guidance, we (as the homeowners/clients) had to become far too involved in monitoring the day-to-day project activities. As an example, a worker arbitrarily decided to modify the location of a concrete pad, and the modified location would have resulted in an electrical code violation upon city inspection. Fortunately, we were home and happened to notice the problem, and got the worker to correct the location of the pad before the concrete was poured. The reason we hired a contractor in the first place was so that we would NOT have to get involved and worry over all the small details of construction…. Eventually, it became very clear that Mark had chosen to quickly take our down payment, but then not give any priority to our project, not supply enough workers, and completely ignore our project schedule. At this point we fired him --- we then estimated the value of the work completed, and asked him for a refund of the down payment above the estimated value (about a $4,000 refund). He gave us no real response for two weeks, then finally responded by claiming we owed him over $1,000 more than our estimate in ‘questionable’ additional costs, and continued to refuse to refund any of the overpaid down payment because he was “still assessing additional charges”. In our opinion, this is a blatant, open-ended attempt to hold on to our money indefinitely (money that he no longer has any legitimate claim to) while he dreams up more & more bogus charges. It seems this is one of those companies that goes around taking money with no intention of performing the work they agreed to do ... and then not return your money -