Handy Dan Construction & Greenwise Landscapes
Monterey, CA

Handy Dan Construction & Greenwise Landscapes Reviews

3.7 stars based on 3 reviews

Featured Comments:

• J

  J

  1.0

  Bottom line up front: I would not recommend Dan of Handy Dan Construction and Greenwise Landscapes. His crew is hard-working, capable, and quick. But, they are limited by Dan's poor leadership, lack of organization, lack of planning, communication, design capability, and lack of attention to detail. The sit down and sip a beer version: My wife and I hired Handy Dan Construction and Greenwise Landscapes to remove an existing 3’ wooden retaining wall under our deck and replace it with a poured concrete retainment wall in addition to integrating a new pathway from the deck area to a tiered lawn down a hill. We received two bids for the project. One from Dan, and one from a competitor. While Handy Dan Construction and Greenwise Landscapes came in significantly more expensive than the alternative bid – on the order of 30% more expensive – Dan convinced me that his company would perform higher-quality work and flexibly work with me to implement a more beautiful and functional design than the competition. While Dan certainly has the gift of the gab, I was unfortunate to learn that his promises and expertise do not match. There were two warning signs I regret ignoring. First, it took Dan 1 month to provide an initial estimate while assuring me he would have the estimate "soon" multiple times. The second warning was that Dan visited the site twice prior to bidding; however, his bid grossly over-estimated the required linear footage of the installed retainment wall. He estimated 285 frontal square feet, while the actual job resulted in 165 frontal square feet of wall being installed. His lack of ability to measure accurately persisted throughout the project. Before I hired Dan to perform the work, I addressed the over-prediction of the linear/frontal square footage in the estimate/bid, and he indicated that it was because the scope was “evolving” as we progressed and that he would likely be routing the retainment wall in multiple ways to deal with the grade of our property. In the end, Dan simply made a wall bridging our property line, with no unique “routing” of the wall, resulting in an overall 35% reduction in the agreed scope, but no downward cost-adjustment. Note, this decreased scope and no cost-adjustment is a theme with Dan. He will promise the moon, but attempt to cut as many corners as possible. In the end, the concrete retaining wall appears to be of quality construction (big thanks to the crew that performed the work). A big part of this is the drainage system that was installed at my insistence, even after Dan griped for 2 days and tried to avoid installing any drainage management for the concrete retainment wall. Note, improper drainage is the cause of failure for the majority of retainment walls. Regarding the pathway, it was a massive design failure. Dan, my wife, and I originally discussed a series of switchbacks, serpentines, or a “meandering” route as Dan would say, to reduce the overall grade of the path in addition to a series of landings. In the end, Dan simply cut a straight line to tie the “new path” into an existing path as soon as possible to reduce his own costs. Additionally, Dan neglected to install a landing at the bottom of the path, which resulted in an overall significant increase in the grade, and likely lead to drainage/erosion problems we are now observing. Overall, poor design choices and lack of any drainage considerations led to the pathway showing substantial signs of erosion from rain within 6 weeks of installation. I have included photos of the pathway shortly after Dan's crew completed the work, as well as images taken 6-10 weeks later, after a few rainstorms had come through and majorly eroded sections of the path. When Dan was contacted about the deficiency, he agreed to come inspect the issue immediately, then proceeded to cancel the appointment at the last minute. In the end, after Dan was evasive about repairs for more than 9 weeks, and non-committal about the scope, I refused to let Dan institute any repairs, and instead opted to just fix his screw-up myself.

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  Response from the owner

  It is not often that I have trouble working effectively with a client but that was certainly the case in this instance. While my crew and I were working at J’s house, he privately propositioned my employees to come back and work for him under the table. This is an ethical breech that caused me a myriad of problems. First, though skilled, my employees are not licensed to do the work J proposed. Legally they must work under the supervision of a licensed contractor. Additionally, if something went wrong and someone was injured, workers compensation liability would boomerang back to me since these are my employees – not freelancers picked up at Home Depot. When I strongly objected to J hiring my employees to work for him off the books, given my potential liability, his response was a dismissive “just get over it”. Needless to say, this caused problems not only in my dealings with J but with my employee relationships as well. Very unpleasant situation and unfortunately it soured the project overall. While I regret that J was dissatisfied with the work done under contract his description of the problems are not accurate. I have been building retaining walls for decades, and though I repeatedly explained the whys and wherefores of the design and the construction, J had a lot of uninformed opinions about how he thought things should be done. As only one example: J wanted me to reinstall a drainage system that had undermined the previous retaining wall and caused it to fail. The concrete retaining wall I constructed did not require a drain per se, as it was built on a sand dune that would provide natural drainage. But, because J absolutely insisted on it, I did reluctantly install a drain that a) was not required, and b) was likely to fill up with sand and fail like the first one. In spite of the disagreement over hiring my employees under the table, I agreed to come back and endeavor make the requested adjustments to the grade after the first rain. I stand behind my work and am always ready to make things right. That I could not drop everything and come over the same day J contacted me – and instead offered to come over on Friday of the same week – irritated J. He cancelled the follow-up appointment, not I.