Miracle Design

We hired Oscar for our backyard design and construction. The design part of it was good. He has a contractor, Julian Corral who did the construction part. Julian is a complete disaster. He doesn’t understand construction. His workmanship is poor. We laid about 3500 square feet of stamped concrete. It started cracking about 15 days after they left the job site. It’s just a huge disaster. He didn’t prepare the ground well. He left gaps between the drainage pipes and ground. This has been extremely disappointing.
Plants:. The plants died. Oscar’s explanation is that the plants had too much of planting mix. The plants were transplanted with their original soil. The primary reason was that they dug the holes in rain and dumped the plants in water filled holes. The roots got soaked and couldn’t get sufficient oxygen. Unfortunately, it was too late by the time we discovered them. They refuse to take any accountability for it.
Grass: The laid a type of grass which needed a lot of sun. The grass grew well when the trees around it did not have their leaves on. As soon as spring came on and the trees started getting their leaves back, the part which was in the shade started to die. I had a pay another contractor to fix the grass as Oscar refuses to accept that they laid the wrong type of grass. There are different types of sod depending upon the application. We didn’t know that.
Electrical: It’s a night mare. The switches started to go bad within a month. I had to replace all the switches they installed. In one of the cases, they put in the wires, but did not tighten them. They just came loose.
Fencework: OMG, can’t believe how they could screw it up. It’s basically nails and wood. The fence started falling apart. The alignment is all screwed up.
Sprinkler system: They installed a sprinkler system with three timers. The first one watered about 20 plants, the second one was for the lawn and the third one was supposed to water about 300 plants. Needless to say, the water from the thrid one does not reach all of the plants. The irony is that there are timers available on the timer. It was just a lazy job. In addition, the drip irrigation system was full of leaks. They tested it during the rain periods which prevented us from checking the system.
I can go on and on … I’d be happy to show the quality of the work they did. Please avoid these guys (Oscar Lintag and Julian Corral) at any cost. It’s not work their sweet talk and cheap prices.

I’ve recently discovered Unilocal and YEAH!, I’m thrilled, its been useful several times now for different recommendations, so here’s my chance to send a ‘shout out’ to some of my favorite people. We’ve been remodeling our house for over 5 years now and generally I’ve been either moderately satisfied or down right dissapointed (I’m fairly particular :-))… so when it came to doing our landscaping (and when we realized the cost of it), we got serious and we must have interviewed at least 20 people overall… when we finally met Oscar (and Swee)… our thought was: ‘FINALLY, this is exactly what we were looking for but after so much work, wasn’t sure existed…” and then we worked with Oscar and his dedication and vision and ability to listen to us and to develop a very specific design that looked like architectural drawings for lighting, sprinklers, hardscape, plantings, etc. — it was wonderful and then he also helped us with bid process and finding good landcape contractor that could handle project on-​budget and on-​time… the whole experience couldn’t have been better — he has also worked with friend of ours in Palo Alto who also gives him double thumbs up… we had debated whether needed to work with designer and landscaper or find someone who could do both… my thoughts now are: the right designer is worth all the money (and Oscar is very reasonable) and will give the best result.