I agree with JMLM. Maybe he's okay to hire for regular yard work maintenance type stuff I could get my teenage son to do but anything that requires more skill - I would NOT recommend him. I asked him to install a French drain and he put in solid (not perforated) corrugated tubing and covered it with my yard dirt, then put three surface drains and said that would take care of my water problem. To me, that's not a French drain. I still had standing water and muck in my yard after it rained only now it was just below the level the surface drain 'tile' that was placed on the soil that along with water, dirt flowed into AND one end of the pipe stayed nearly full of water because the pipe when laid, wasn't graded correctly, it was higher in the middle!. To his credit, he did agree to redo it with PVC and gravel I would purchase - but tore up my yard removing the old tubing and proceeded to take 4 months before he 'completed', killed a 3 ft swath of grass with the dirt on it for that length of time and in the end he walked off the job without completing it and I had to hire someone else to complete his job. He wanted to put a popup emitter on the surface at the end which would have required water to run uphill since the end of the French drain was almost 2 ft deep - Oh! No!, Actually it would have just stayed full of water like his original job and my soil would been continuously mucky and my plants would have died of root rot. Just another job the customer has to finish!\r
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Make sure you get detailed explanation, in writing, how he's going to do his job. If you get a guarantee, get that in writing too. I'd also suggest a timeline for completion, of course if you've already paid, you can throw all everything out the window.
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