Tried to save some costs and use neighborhood side gig guys to act as day laborers for a landscaping project.

I have secured all materials. Have tools. And am home to direct work.

Project entails removal of existing mulch in flower beds. Removal of 5-7 dead bushes and a handful of annual plants.

Planting roughly 20 bushes. 40-50 perennial 1g plants. Laying down 3 yards of bed soil/mulch mix. And cleanup.

These guys show up an hour late. "Work" for about 2 hours then leave "for class". Supposed to come back at 330. Say they're coming. Never show.

Tools and materials that I placed (I placed all plants in the beds for planting as they requested) are left unattended.

Then wish washy about when they'd be back.

Now he says he wants to be paid for the work they did, which he says is 20% of the total estimate. Realistically, they did maybe 5%. I paid 10% the total and said don't bother coming back.

These looked to be post college guys looking to make cash and then showed up and realized landscaping (not just laying bags of mulch) is hard effing work.

Yeah, that all checks out. People are always eyeing me when I say how much my home projects cost, and that's because **** isn't cheap anymore. If you want people that do it mostly right and mostly on time, it's mostly expensive. Sucks tbh.

Vicarious report from larger custom home builders that speak Spanish/other

They go to day labor hangout locations that are either coffee shops or intersections and
cherry pick what you need & those that agree OK with scope of work
They either put them in the truck or they have their own.

Sometimes bush pulling requires a truck, chain, etc. so be prepared for all that.
This might be Phase One and if DIY, rental equipment on hand.

Phase Two could even be "The Big Event" if in Aggieland. Buy these student/volunteers a pizza upon completion IF only
light duty from painting, tossing mulch, maybe weeding, supervised plant installations, etc. but others report more work than this possible BUT
NOT the big muscle, heavy duty gardening I think am reading here.

Photos would be enjoyable to follow

bushes as in... 1 year old dead boxwoods, lol

Pay only when work is complete. State that clearly up-front. I think that would have avoided much of this.

Oh for sure but I wasn't willing to let them go until finished and the job be poorly done. Fight with them over fixing it. Etc.

So that was a bit of an eject fee on my end.

The other crew worked about 12 hours yesterday and finish about 45 minutes before we got a lovely soaking of rain. As projected on my end.

I needed to get all these plants in the ground and going.

More rain expected today, tomorrow and Saturday. Bless those rains.

These guys sound like tweakers looking to score some quick cash for their next hit.

akaggie05 said:

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These guys sound like tweakers looking to score some quick cash for their next hit.

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nah, they're young adults and do car detailing with pretty good reviews on the neighborhood FB page. They also had some posts about landscaping but in hindsight it was definitely more "show up and thrown down 20-30 bags of mulch and clean up some dead stuff"

I take some blame for assuming these jokers could do real work.