Just venting here. But!! Systems Paving, a fairly large company, has some issues. If you are seriously thinking about using them. Think again. Here's my issues with them:

The estimated time from start to finish was about 1 week. In the end, it took 6 weeks - and they still aren't done. They still have to pick up a pile of pavers in my front yard. My neighbors have been complaining.

1) One of the sitting walls they built for me is not straight up and down. It leans back and looks badly.
2) The crew doing the work doesn't read the job information fully - they used the wrong color pavers in one of my paving areas (I have 1100 sq ft of pavers installed.
3) They didn't order enough pavers to complete the job - had to wait 3 weeks for new pavers to be delivered.
4) The lights that I paid them $150 each to install looks badly. The face plates are all scratched up and looks badly. Now I have to order new face plates - these lights cost me $60/each on top of the install.
5) They havn't picked up the remaining pallets of pavers in my front yard.

My current actions:

1) I've called my credit card company to dispute the final payment. I think with corporate seeing a dispute for such a large sum (more than what I paid for my first car) will hopefully be noticed.

They took my credit card information at the start. They billed the first third when they start the demolishion work, second third when materials are delivered, and last third when the job is done.

2) I started calling corporate offices and letting them know of the situation. I also inform them that I'm disputing the charges.

3) I've called the regional office and left notice of the situation and me disputing the charge on my credit card.

Actions taken so far:

1) One phone call to me from some random field office rep saying the order to pick those up was called in a long time ago. SO!! Big deal, i still have pavers in my front yard.

I'd post pictures with this, but I don't have any at the moment.

So far so good. However, the installers are careless about my stuff. They damaged my nice refrigerator pulling it out. I don't know how because it takes two fingers to move the thing - it's on nice wheels. Regardless, the flooring is looking nice.

WOW! The yards are being completely transformed. Here's some pictures to give a brief status update.

Front yard:

Back yard:

Side yard:

The sitting walls are still being built. Hopefully should be done in the next couple of days - if it doesn't rain!

Two nights ago I was driving home and when I was a half mile away I see a big cloud of smoke about where my house is. As I get closer and closer, the smoke is still about where my house is. I started thinking "OMG, hope everyone is okay..." then it was "crap, my digital pictures are gone!".. This was before I realized that I keep two offsite backups of my computers. :-)

It turns out that the dry field behind my house was on fire. I didn't have my digital camera with me to take pictures. As I was pulling into the garage, fire engines were still showing up. I ran in to get my camera than ran over to the bike path to see what was going on. They had already put the fire out! I'm glad they put the fire out so quickly as the flames were pretty high and bright, but disappointed that I couldn't snap a picture.

I'm fairly safe from fires since it would have to cross over a 10 foot drainage canal, then a blacktop bike path. There's not alot in my backyard to to catch fire and my roof is made of concrete tiles. :-)

Anyways, something random, scary, and some excitement in my life. All this talk is making me hungry - off to the grocery store.

Here's a picutre of a german forest fire (not my picture - from public domain source).