Yard Butlers in Seattle

These guys do a great job, but I particularly wanted to commend Blaine. He's friendly, takes a lot of pride in his work, and while all of the employees do a good job, he always does a GREAT job. You're lucky to have a worker like him on your team!

A quality organization! They show up when they say, they get right to work, if they see something that needs to be done (that we did not discuss) they just take care of it. The quality of work is excellent and I could not be happier to have found them.

Lack of integrity, again and again. Damages created & repaired on our dollar, and not warrantied. Annual clean-up estimate price by owner given, then changed. Then changed again at billing. Later it was honored. Our original site visit for estimate by Bill himself, "30 years experience," for $325 per month + tax, with $650 annual trimming & pruning. After beginning service, promptly changed service rates to $405.53 per month + tax, and $975 annual trimming & pruning (will come back to for what actual annual clean-up was eventually billed). We have a large yard so we thought interesting mistake for a long-time pro, but okay, was more than previous landscapers, maybe this guy is worth it. Our 18-year-old sprinkler system needed some TLC, and his long-time irrigation team of two people surveyed the property and quoted "$1200." Quoted emailed to us was $2400. Again, we took the price change anyway, also adding some trench digging for an ongoing landscape lighting electrical repair, at which point irrigation pipes were damaged by his landscape team -- these were -not- fixed for free like another review had mentioned when this happened to them, we paid full labor for their breaking & (temporary, see below) repair of our irrigation pipes. 8 months later, this very same pipe repair did not hold and burst water last week. We contacted Bill to have no response to warranty his recent repair (again this was a break -created- by his team we had already paid for repair last fall). The case of little to no response, even after many attempts, for many requests from weeding to treating clovers and moss, and fertilizing, most of which if we were lucky we caught the operations team, mainly Carlos who usually completed most items when requested. Messaging the owner was rarely a good way to spend our time, and Carlos said we needed to contact Bill. This was frustrating. It was somehow helpful to know many other reviewers had these issues as well. Finally, this last item did eventually get resolved but it was another case of us needing to keep watch, something we don't feel we should be on guard for -- the original $650 annual clean-up proposed by owner at his own estimate, which after service began changed promptly up to $975. What was billed through when annual clean up was actually done? $1650. Invoice 24711, for $1650, was later discounted by $800. It is worth noting there was an additional $2k+ in compost delivery where they buried our 25+ sprinkler heads, and his own irrigation team shared how unhappy they were as this always happened. Luckily with our other service of $2400+ in irrigation updates, they uncovered the heads before the compost settled and became an issue at all with the system in the spring (albeit at the breaking of a pipe we paid for repair). Overall, we felt keeping tabs on whether prices would be honored on various occasions, paying for damages & repairs they created, and then not even honoring warranty of those repairs, was not worth all the effort. We found another well-reviewed landscaper who charged rates less than Bill originally estimated (but then changed), and substantially less for annual clean-up.

We received several quotes and design ideas to improve our yard landscaping, including a difficult-to-deal-with rockery that had failed in the last 6 months. Bill understood our needs, and offered options that we hadn't thought of - but worked well for us. And the team at Yard Butlers were curteous, hard working and efficient. We love the results and recommend The YardButlers

Got an estimate for some clean up work (blackberry and ivy). He arrived on time and was pleasant enough. His bid was twice the price of my other two bids, plus his proposal was for me to hire his crew for the day and manage the project myself. Um...what's the point of paying a landcaper if I'm directing his crew? I'd just pay a couple neighborhood teenagers in that case for a fraction of the price. Pass.

I hired Yard Butlers to do a total spring clean up of my 7500 square foot lot and pressure wash driveways and patios. Bill was responsive and professional and gave me a written bid detailing the work to be done. He personally pruned my camellia and two Japanese Maples, The crew did a great job getting all the moss out of the lawns, weeding the beds, and working as a team, The pressure washing made an enormous difference! Bill knows plants and how to take care of them and made good suggestions for future projects. I found him pleasant and flexible.Will hire them again.

We hired Yard Butlers to replace our lawn, which had totally died last summer after our irrigation system broke and there were the two stretches of really hot days. Bill not only came out once to give us an estimate, he readily came back a few days later to consult on some more landscaping work that I had considered adding to the job. The crew was always on the job by 8am and tidied up the tools on site before they left each day. While tilling the soil for new sod, they ran into some of our poorly-laid irrigation lines, which had not been buried deeply enough, and despite the fact that it was not their installation issue, they fixed the breaks for free. They also took the initative to fix (for a small fee) a few other irrigation hoses that they found were already broken as they were laying the sod. Part of the job was to place stones (that we purchased separately) as a walk way in the grass, and the crew was very responsive to my feedback about how I wanted the path to look before they cut them into the sod.

I used the Yard Butlers about a year ago for general landscaping, they would come every 2 weeks and spend about 15-30 minutes just mowing and sometimes pulling some weeds. I would spend $150 a month for this service. I finally cancelled because I was sick of spending so much money for such a terrible job. I had communicated with Bill multiple times about my disappointment in the service and only got excuses or attitude. We rehired them two months ago because we haven’t had time to find another service and we had been out of town a lot. As much as I didn’t want to hire them back, I needed the yard cleaned up before we had company. They came 3 times since then, and I decided that we only really needed them once a month because the grass doesn’t grow much in the summer anyways and we really just needed weeds pulled and general cleanup. I called Bill requesting this and he convinced me that they needed to come 2 times a month and one week they will just mow and the other week they will pull weeds. I said “are you still going to charge me $75 for that” and he said yes because they will spend the same amount of time. I was totally manipulated and gave in. Two days later was when they were supposed to come, no one showed up. I work from home so I was home the entire day, nothing. I entered it into my calendar just in case he would try charging us. I figured he decided to do once a month. Didn’t bother calling since we didn’t need landscaping done anyways. I decided to hire a guy off Craigslist this last Saturday and he charged $60 and was here for longer than the Yard butlers ever were. This morning the Yard butlers showed up, started mowing the APPARENT freshly mowed grass and I called and told Bill we didn’t need them to do anything since they didn’t show up two weeks ago we hired someone else. First thing he said was “I wish you would have called and told me”, I said “well no one has showed up in a month so I had to hire someone else to take care of it” and he tells me after much argument to go tell his guys they can leave... instead of him calling his employees he wanted me to go out and tell them to stop working. He is so completely and utterly rude and unprofessional and I would NEVER recommend to anyone to use his company. Every time I have called him about an issue he always has an attitude about it. And I sent an email today confirming the cancellation of the service and he responded by saying “They have been coming every other week as per our conversation. I think its best to part ways.” He apparently doesn’t want the business and never learned customer service skills.