Forest View Tree and Landscaping Services

So a couple weeks ago, some tree-cutters were going door to door looking for clients. I had to clear away some small trees to get a fence installed, so I accepted. I was also curious about any recommendations they might have had for additional work. My back yard is pretty heavily wooded, and some of the trees are quite large. In addition to the fence lanes that needed to be cleared out, there were a few trees that were dead or dying that they recommended I clear out, so I agreed. It all ended up costing $5k, which was a bit of a blow, but that's not the reason I've come out of my internet cave to create this post. There was one pretty huge oak tree that they needed to get rid of, turns out it was rotting from the inside out. This tree had already been cut back quite a bit by the previous homeowners, and the limbs extended out over my deck and the roof of my house. As they were working, I heard several loud thuds and thought nothing of it at the time. But when they left, I looked around to check things out. Turns out they dumped a lot of the wood in one of the fence lanes they cleared out and pretty much just scattered the firewood around my back yard, rather than piling it up or anything. That's irritating, but fine, I can shove some tree bits out of the way, myself. But then later I checked out my deck. I was less than pleased. Fortunately, the deck is still structurally sound, but several of the fencepost caps had been broken off and the ends of some of the planks on the deck itself had been chipped off. All in all, it's pretty superficial damage, but still, it's damage that I cannot repair myself, and surely it was pretty easily avoidable with a couple of ropes. As I was brooding, I did a little math. The wanted to charge me $3,000 for the giant oak that draped over my roof. I told them I was already paying $3,000 for the rest of the work and he quickly brought the price down to $2000. But even at that price, let's assume a $20 per hour rate, that's still 100 man-hours of work. Divide that among 10 people and you're still left with 10 hours of work, yet they were done in three or four hours. $60 per hour seems a bit steep for such poor service and straight up negligence. I tried calling them to give them a chance to make things right, asking for $1,000 in refund (rather generous on my part, given how much they overcharged me). They just yelled at me about calling them on their vacation and told me they didn't want to give me a thousand dollars from their company (go figure, but I don't really want to get ripped off by a thousand dollars, either). Still, he made arrangements to come see me and look at things in a couple days, and then never showed up. Not surprising, but now you can understand why I'm here. It's not worth the time, cost, or stress of taking him to court, at least not to me, but the very least I can do is let everyone know to be cautious around Kirk Skaggs and his company.