September 13, 2003

No More TruGreen

Posted by Scott at 09:01 AM

TruGreen service - A few weeks ago when we were very close to just seeding the lawn with clover, Michelle spoke with TruGreen. We decided to try once more to aerate and overseed the lawn as well as add lime to shift the pH. They even offered us a decent price if we pre-paid for the service. We had them aerate last year. Back then a thirty something man (ie. a "grownup") came out, worked for about an hour and a half and thoroughly aerated the soil. I followed up with overseeding the lawn myself with some seed I purchased from BlueSeal. In aggregate it took between 2 and 3 hours to get it all done.

So you can imagine Michelle's feelings when this year they sent a much younger guy who managed to do both aeration and overseeding in about 45 minutes. When you walked across the lawn you could see the paths he traversed because that's what they were: paths. Fairly upset at the job, Michelle called TruGreen back and asked that someone else come out to do the job right. A couple of days later the same young man comes out to "redo the spots he missed". Again he was in and out in no time! That's it. We are not renewing our service with TruGreen next season. I can understand that turnover in that kind of position is such that you may not always get the best of employees, but when they send the same careless guy after explicit instruction to send someone else, they just don't deserve the money. We'll either get a different service or apply the fertilizers ourselves.

Book cases arrive - I mentioned that last week we decided to change the dining room for now into a toy/play room. This opened up a bunch of space in the family room once all the toys boxes, chests, etc were all moved out. My dad might argue that it opened up too much space because we then bought a set of book cases to go where a bunch of the toy boxes used to be. It arrived yesterday and looks nice. We haven't put anything in it yet because we want to secure it to the wall. These would definitely kill our smaller children if the cases fell on them.

Misc. domestic news - I think I mentioned that Timothy is really getting around in his walker now. This week he has also started to get the hang of sitting up on his own. He's also cutting his third tooth. When the twins stayed at Kathy's during Timothy's MRI, they got fresh buzz haircuts (or as my mom teases "convict haircuts"). Claire had an ice cream social with her classmates from last year. Abby helped Michelle decorate the house with autumn decorations. Claire and Abby are both complaining about getting their toes run over by Timothy's walker while Michelle says "welcome to my world!"

Comments

You were lucky. We spent $6,000 with TruGreen to kill all of the bermuda grass and weeds on 40,000 sq. feet of lawn and meadow, and hydroseed, last Spring. After a hot summer and a wet Fall the irrigated part of the meadow is full of weeds and bermuda, and no grass - worse than before. The non-irrigated part which was killed and hydroseeded is now growing grass with no weeds.

Posted by: Perry at December 6, 2003 04:43 PM