Rose Landscapes

We’ve been in our house a little over five years and we’d been making do with two postage stamp-​sized extensions of the foundation outside the back doors acting as patios. There was barely room for a table and chairs and minimal room for the grill. Our other big problem was that the back of our house faces west, and every afternoon in the summer the sun would beat mercilessly on our windows and those tiny patio areas. Grilling and just stepping out the back door was painful in the heat of the afternoon sun.
Rose Landscapes to the rescue! Earlier this year we had four companies come out to review what we were interested in doing and to provide a bid. Chris Rose (owner) was the only one who spent real time (like hours) with us up front to understand just what we were looking for. The others either spent minimal time and submitted a bid twice that of Chris’, or could not prepare a bid without doing a design and us paying for it (I can understand the need for this in a way, but how do I know if I want to hire you if you can’t tell me what the job is going to cost? The design from one company was going to be about $ 500!). Chris started doing sketches while we talked and prepared an actual plan while he was working on the bid (we got a copy after we committed).
Anyway, they were able to start work just a couple weeks after we approved the plans (we got our job started while some other people were making design changes and/​or dicking around with their HOAs, which, thankfully, we don’t have). Chris said the work would take about a month, which I thought was an amazingly short amount of time. He subs out some of the work, but only for things like arbors and irrigation (and maybe some other things we didn’t need). Rose Landscapes does all the work for retaining walls, patios and walkways, driveways, water features, outdoor kitchens, and other things (take a look at his web site). The total job actually took five weeks, but that was still amazing. You hear those nightmares about renovations taking months while the contractor goes off and is doing other jobs and never seems to be able to get back to yours. The really great thing about Rose Landscapes is that they are a small company (at least for now) and do one job at a time. And Chris works shoulder to shoulder with his crew to make sure everything is perfect. Chris and his team were professional and on time every day. And they worked long hours each day (like about 8:30 — 5).
In a nutshell, our back yard looks great! It’s even better than I imagined it would be. We have a real patio (done with Pavestone Venetian Stone) with walkways to the sides of the house. We had the original brick retaining walls replaced with moss boulders and have new boulder steps leading down to the pool area. We also had them plant the bedding areas and Chris did a great job choosing the plants for those (one could be more involved in that process, but we asked him to just choose things he thought would do well). The company Chris uses to build arbors also did a fantastic job. The arbors look great and we now don’t have to close the blinds on our west facing windows all afternoon every afternoon — it’s really nice not living in a cave anymore! Plus we can go outside and grill in the evenings without the sun beating us down.
I highly recommend Rose Landscapes and plan to use them again. PS — Don’t wait until spring to start a landscaping design process or you’ll be competing for time with everyone else.