Elite Outdoor Designs

The best things I can say about EOD are they have beautifully painted trucks, and a friendly, young, sales guy who was expert with slick 3D simulation software to clinch the sale.

Quality of finished work is below average. And when it comes to execution, communication, project management, scheduling, permitting, attention to detail, oversight of subs, keeping to an agreed time frame, cleanup, and truthfulness, this company is abysmal!

We chose EOD for our backyard redo, because they convinced us they had lots of experience with the type of water features we wanted. The project included new travertine, a fire pit, bbq area and the water features. It was supposed to take 4-6 weeks. After 4 months it still was not done. They failed to identify existing gas and electric lines before demolition, which led to rupture of the gas line and shut off of our irrigation system for weeks during 100+ degree heat. We had to water the rest of the yard by hand! They never accepted responsibility for this.

Months of delay were due to ineptitude in getting the gas permit, and sign offs. Supervision of subs was sorely lacking, with subs constantly asking me for direction. When I would respond, “Just follow the plan,” they would say, “We lost plan.”

We had a detailed contract that was almost meaningless. If the contract specified 8 landscape lights, they would give us 6. If it specified 2 new electric lines they would give us one. Then they would make us feel like we were unreasonable for simply asking them to fulfill the contract as stated. They repeatedly asked, cajoled and pressured us to pay in CASH rather than by check. This was not in the contract either!

They failed to mask our windows before blowing in cement for the fountains, which resulted in a broken window that they tried to blame on a golf ball until I showed them my photo of a glob of cement still sticking to the window at the point of fracture.

For weeks they told us they were waiting for “their best tile guy for our job.” After he finally showed up, I later learned from another sub that “their best tile guy” had only worked for EOD for a few weeks and was not very experienced.

It is seven months now since we ended our relationship with EOD. In that time period we had to hire a different company to complete the landscaping, and another company to redo faulty tile work and a major rework of the water features, all at our additional expense. Our “4-6 week project” is now finished – after 10 months!

Avoid Elite Outdoor Design at all costs!

Absolutely HORRIBLE to work with! STAY AWAY from this company! Pay 15% more to have a legitimate company do your project!!

We had Elite do our entire backyard in a new home, which consisted of a pool, pavers, built-in BBQ, grass sod area, in-ground trampoline, trees/bushes/plants, and side yard cement and RV side-yard driveway pavers.

I believe in being fair to companies that provide work and will list some pros first:

Pros:
- Overall they left us with a good looking backyard. We get lots of compliments on how good it all looks (it LOOKS great, but see “cons” below about quality of the work)
- Jason (the sales guy) was very nice. Poor at communicating (see “cons” below), but nice

That’s where the pros end and the cons begin. It was an ABSOLUTE NIGHTMARE working with Elite Outdoor Designs. Here is a list of most of the things we can remember that went wrong:

Cons:
- They make promise after promise after promise, only to never keep ANY of them! They tell you whatever you want to hear at the moment you want to hear it, but then never actually do what they say they’re going to. There are SO MANY instances that fall into this category that I won’t even begin to list any specific incidents.
- The told us it would take 6-8 weeks to finish the backyard project. It’s now 8 MONTHS later and they’re still not completely done. They got the pool done in about 4 months (which is 16 weeks instead of 8 weeks as promised), then it took them 6-8 MORE weeks to get most of the rest done, and now we’re at 8 months out and still are waiting for the last things to get done.
- The backyard LOOKS great, but it is VERY poor workmanship in many areas, such as: the in ground cleaning system doesn’t clean >90% of the ground as they guaranteed, the pool equipment has HUGE leaks that they keep telling us they’re going to fix, but don’t, the plants have all died and will have to be replaced (they tell us they will switch them out with the warranty, but I highly doubt that’ll actually happen), there are various artistic paver pieces that have already cracked (a lot of them were damaged when they placed them and they told us they’d put non-broken ones in, but of course they haven’t). And those are just to name a few. Overall, the built-in BBQ doesn’t have anything wrong with it and the in-ground trampoline is good and the sod is good (because we watered it like crazy and fertilized it a bunch).
- The kept doing things in the wrong order. For example, they put the rock in the plant area but then had to remove the rock to lay down the landscape lighting wires, then when they put the rock back down over the wires there was dirt all in the rocks so now it just looks like dirt with some rocks in it. They did this VARIOUS times over the course of the project. They had no regard for doing things in a logical order so as to avoid having to damage things.
- They NEVER communicate anything to you. They leave you in the complete dark for weeks on end and randomly show up unannounced to complete 1 thing and then never tell you when anything else will happen.
- 6 weeks of the delay with the pool was them trying to get the permits from the city for the pool. They literally just sat there for 4 out of the 6 weeks doing NOTHING toward getting the permits. I finally had to go into the city myself to get the permits.
- They kept trash all over the yard for weeks on end and when they went to “clean up” they just threw dirt over a bunch of their garbage and put rock over. We’re digging up trash all over the place as rock gets moved.
- Their owner, Brad, is completely unresponsive and so are all of his employees. Once you give them money, they more or less abandon you and don’t do anything unless you threaten to get a lawyer. I paid them everything that was due and they still refuse to finish certain items. They say they “are trying as hard as possible” to finish things, but it’s been 3 weeks since anyone has contacted me at all. Today I got a message saying that they just don’t care anymore to fulfill and keep their promises and I can get a lawyer and they don’t care at all.