Brother's Landscaping

If you have a need for straightforward mowing that won't require much interaction I'd still say consider them in the running. For anything else I'd recommend looking elsewhere. Starting with the good: Brothers Landscaping has been extremely reliable when it came to mowing. They also helped with cleaning gutters and when one of my downspouts failed (split in the back) they prioritized coming out and coming up with a low cost fix that also moved water further away from the house. They helped us pull up all the grass on our hellstrip when we wanted to landscape it and also pulled back the edge around some trees. All of that was done well. The not great but serviceable: There were some communication issues over the time we worked together. I asked Erwin, the owner, to help with leaf cleanup at end of year, just leaf cleanup. We work with a horticulturalist who intentionally left cuttings in place for overwintering insects. Erwin cleaned all of that up and charged us for a full end of year cleanup even though it wasn't requested. I didn't mind paying the additional for what was a minor oversight and never brought it up. He generally didn't raise concerns about what was or was not a good idea. If you're looking for a contractor to partner in that way he won't. I understand that's something a lot of contractors avoid because some homeowners don't want to hear it, so that's not a major strike. Sometimes they weren't super thorough. When we initially started working with them, every time they cleaned our gutters they'd pick up the leaves that came out. Following that year was hit or miss. Sometimes we'd come home to piles of wet clumps of leaves on the ground. The reasons we no longer work with Brothers Landscaping: On their site they advertise handyman work. I was putting planter boxes on my shed. The instructions required attaching the box directly. It also came with decorative brackets. The instructions suggested getting a handyman. I wanted to make sure it was done properly and enlisted Brothers' help. I gave both verbal and written instructions for how the window boxes should be mounted. When I checked on the install I found that they hadn't used the included hardware and had installed improperly. - They mounted through the decorative brackets with multiple screws. They missed the studs multiple times, adding multiple additional unnecessary holes in the shed. - They attached the decorative brackets to the box by going through the drainage holes instead of drilling new ones as was explicit in the provided instructions. The window box, which in pictures on the website showed a grown person sitting on it safely, was not well secured due to the improper install. When I spoke with Brothers they were defensive. They said it's stable, I never told them what to do, they had to work around it because they didn't have the right drill. This was a consistent pattern in our years working with them that I had made peace with. In this case all they had to do was tell me they couldn't do the job, or that they had questions and I would have left happy. Ultimately I ate the cost of replacing the brackets they damaged and hired a handyman to install properly. We continued to use them for landscaping. The most recent incident came when we arrived home after they'd been by to mow and found that our pop up emitter for our sump was damaged. It sticks a few inches up. Initially Erwin was understanding. I followed up about four days later because I was concerned about animals getting in, wanted to pin down a date. At that point he responded that his team said they didn't do it. There were no large branches around that could have landed on it. The piece was thoroughly destroyed, one broken piece nearby, one where it snapped, and the rest missing. I suggested I could pick up a replacement since I'd be at Home Depot and deduct from next mowing fee. Erwin was defensive. He said they'd picked up some of our yard waste when they came by to mow without charging us, and going forward they would charge us. The part was 20 bucks or so.

My neighbors hired these guys for snow removal. As they were clearing my neighbors sidewalk they dumped the snow on my portion of the sidewalk that I am responsible for clearing. By the time I had noticed this there was a significant pile of snow deposited on my section of the sidewalk. I went to go talk to them and asked them to deposit the snow on the strip between the road and the sidewalk (which is what everyone else in the neighborhood does) and remove the pile they had created on my portion of the sidewalk. The worker became argumentative and combative, ignored my request and ended up driving off shortly after. I tried to call, message, and email the company to resolve the issue. All to no avail. One thing to note is it is illegal to remove snow and place it on someone else's property or public way.