We Won!
Our landscaper sued us for money owed. We went to court. We won.
The slightly longer version is slightly more interesting, but only barely so.
We hired a landscape company based on the friendly referral of the owner's daughter who overheard the wife talking. Well, the daughter said "my dad does that," and gave his number. We called, liked his offer and demeanor, and hired him.
Our entire lawn was crap after our remodeling a few years ago. The equipment, workers, and materials spread around the lawn destroyed the whole thing. We'd been trying to bring it back by coaxing seed to grow, but the only thing that seemed to take was the weeds that crept into the nice, fertile soil. The job seemed simple enough. Sure, hard work, but that's the reason we were hiring it out to people who chose (to whatever degree) to do the work.
The entire lawn was to be scraped up, the ground leveled by filling in holes and shaving off mounds. This seemed the most trivial. When the ground was level, and the other work done, cover the whole thing in nice, robust sod.
On the South side of the front yard we have a two-foot high hill that sloped a little steeply, so we wanted that contour removed. At the base of the hill, in the space between ours and our neighbor's houses, there was a bit of depression that caught rain water and let it pool in our basement, so we wanted that re-contoured while they did the hill to allow the water to run toward the front of the property; the hard part here is that while our property had the slope from the house to the sidewalk, the neighbor did not, thus the hill between the properties.
On the North side of the house we have a little bit of sidewalk left from the remodel. In both the back and front we had stuff that required excavation, and this removed the sidewalk that wrapped around the house, leaving only this bit on the side. We wanted that removed, and knowing that heavy equipment (well, heavy enough) would be used and the lawn between the houses on that side, we wanted that re-sod, too. And since the damage would probably extend into a bit of lawn that the neighbor had inadvertently over-fertilized and destroyed, we said to go ahead and cover that with sod, too.
