Landscaping - the Wild West in NZ

Any new home needs landscaping. You need to cover the ground to avoid weeds, mud and dust. The other reason is the covenants imposed by developers. Having paid a lot of money for a designer to transfer my drawing to their computer software, as required by the developer, to progress my house plans to the Council, I have been surprised by what happened throughout the projects.

Most residents in NZ who build a home have no interest in gardening. They seem to think a garden is a line of grisilina along the fence line and some box hedging up the front path.There is no interest in diversity, the balance of insects, feeding themselves with fresh food and no effort at being sustainable.

Not everyone has gardening as a hobby, of course, but I am dismayed that natural beauty and sustainability are not of importance to so many ordinary kiwis. I wanted both things. After choosing a landscaper recommended by the designer I found progress totally dependent on me chasing things up. Getting the base landscaping required co ordination with the builder. This was not seamless and slow delivery of my pergola wood really held things up.

Eventually things commenced but it was ALL supposed to finish for Christmas. A week before Christmas my landscaper told me he'd be finishing up that week, he had a lot on, so I would have to wait a couple of months for Christmas, New Year and his extended holiday.

I had added in a garden shed to be installed but everything else was per the plans. At least the front fences were done so I could paint them over the break and the irrigation of my flower beds was complete but there was still a bit to do. Oh and they broke part of the fence with a truck and put a hole in my stormwater system. Both of which they had to repair.

Then the lawn guy decided his bit would take a few days and it would be too much of a stretch to complete his bit by Christmas. I'd have to wait quite a long while as he was busy with his hobby rather than working after New Year. Sigh!

I didn't hear from my first landscaper though I had always made on- time progress payments. I gave him some leeway but eventually needed to call him as I needed lawns to be laid  by my lawn installer.

The landscaper arrived with a partially different and smaller crew. The most competent team member was now working elsewhere and I was left with two guys who spent as much time off site fluffing around getting supplies as they spent on the job. Sometimes they were gone 3 times a day and like many contractors the days are somewhat short.

The kitset garden shed was a standard Duratuff. It took them 8 hours to put it together, and rather badly too.

The landscaper knocked on my door just after completion and demanded $2500 extra. He said the bill for the driveway and paths was more than he expected so I would have to pay up. After all, he had done his best for me, had generously allowed me to have the leftover concrete as a pad for my shed so I had to be reasonable.

As a long-term unemployed person trying to survive and complete my only asset I was shocked and horrified. I told him a quote is a quote and I had no more money. He wasn't sympathetic and still expected the extra money. I was very upset and feeling vulnerable but my neighbour told me to stick to my guns.

Hard as it was I needed to. The landscaper finally gave in, muttering his business might go to the wall because of me.

I contacted my lawn installer who also had not kept in touch. Poor communication was a hallmark here. He had provided a quote but mistakes by the original designer who hadn't bothered to even visit my site when she did my plan meant she hadn't realised there was no council footpath. This meant I was responsible for landscaping quite a slice of land in front of my house. More expense, so I suggested the lawn guy come back to redo his quote. This time I was going to have gravel paths around my veggie beds so there was less for him to do out the back and a bit more in front. It pretty much evened out and I accepted a separate quote for lawn irrigation but the state of my lawn areas was a disgrace.

The first landscaper had lost interest and hadn't made it level. The lawn guy hadn't been in a hurry to start the job and so the lumps and bumps were covered with weeds and rocks which I tried to deal to as best I could. I needed to pay the lawn guy to do what I had paid the first guy.

The day before the lawn guy was due to start putting in the lawn irrigation tubes my neighbour and I barrelled gravel around the paths around my veggie beds after I had laid the weedmat. It was hot, heavy work which my lawn guy knew I was doing. He popped over to drop some boxing off. But when he started the irrigation the next day, his team started digging up my gravel paths, dumping dirt on them. The whole point of gravel and weedmat is to avoid dirt and weeds. I pointed this out and was reprimanded stiffly by the lawn guy and told not to hold up his team, not to create problems and stop commenting, they knew what they were doing. If he had told me he was digging up the previous day's work (he had seen me in action) I would have left the gravel off for him and made things easier. I found that every second meeting he was like Jekyll and Hyde. I'd lost a certain trust in him.

Things continued and the lawn was going down at last. Suddenly he packed up the lawn product back in his truck and took off saying he would finish the next week. Then I received a text saying he had run out of product and it would take a week to order more from Auckland. That was disappointing but what could I do?  And then came the knock on the door. He had to use more product than quoted so I would have to pay for more. His measurements weren't correct. He got nasty about it. I went inside to get the quote, came out while he was collecting his tools but he said said he didn't have time to discuss that with me, he had better places to be and that he had been more than generous with his time and given me what I wanted and listened to my ideas. HuH???? Isn't that what you do for clients?

My neighbours told me that if I had not been a woman on her own, if there had been a guy standing behind me, none of these jerks would have tried to extort more money.


Yet more nasty financial pressure. Again, my neighbours offered moral support and said stick to the quote. Ten days later he was back. He knew he had made a mistake but I had no trust at all and didn't want to have to deal with him. I told myself to hang in there and see it through. Meanwhile I had popped out with my neighbour to check out a nursery and as we returned they stopped to talk to their hydroseeding lawn guy. I sat quietly and listened but my jaw dropped when the lawn seeder said a guy he knew well in the lawn business was having a problem with a client. As the conversation I was listening to progressed it was clear the gossip concerned me. The whole thing was unprofessional. Even the seeding guy felt a quote was a quote. My neighbour nodded over to me so that the seeder stopped speaking abruptly. Shame. I'd have liked to hear the rest of the gossip.

Months later I now have lawns that look quite good except for some bare bits and some dying patches. I hope those will repair once Spring arrives.

Welcome to the NZ Wild West aka some landscaping contractors. I'm sure there are some good ones. I can only shine the light on my experiences of this very expensive stage of building a new home.They have no shame or decency. Their customer service is dependent on their moods. They leave upset and worried clients in their wake and they gossip. They gossip with other trades about clients and sometimes it gets back to the clients via a third party. Their clients take a back seat to these guys' hobbies so projects that should have taken 2 weeks can end up taking 5 months.

Some of my neighbours are less than happy with landscapers too. New subdivisions are ripe ground for ripoffs and dishonesty. The quality of work is extremely patchy and the quote prices are often astronomical. My lawn quotes had a range of $10,000 between the lowest and the highest. Allow at least 10% of the cost of your house build as the additional cost of landscaping.
This has been a horrid experience. Beware.