I hired GTO Paving to build two retaining walls for the back yard of my house. I hired them because even though they were $1500 more expensive than the other quote, I thought they were a family run business that stands by their work. I WAS WRONG.
They first messed up when forming the retaining wall. There workers measured on the left side of it on one end and then the right side on the other. This made the wall angled by the thickness of the retaining wall (8"), you can see this in the photo provided. They did come back and redo the forms to correct this. The whole time the workers were trying to give excuses to my wife and blaming us while we provided proof of the issue (we own a GC company for 8 years and test contractors on our house before using on clients, for this very reason). This set them back a day and they didn't want to move the next job to a later date. So they showed up the following day afterwards. The issue with this is my neighbor has two dogs and was having to keep them inside while he didn't have a fence.
The day they did show back up, no one informed us that they were going to be pouring the same day. Normally not an issue, but I was needing to be there to place the metal fence posts correctly while they were pouring. We already spoke with GTO about this and they agreed. The issue is I already had plans of taking my mother to her doctor's appointments two weeks earlier. So they needed to place the posts without me. They later complained about this and tried to charge me for this, but they were forced to install them due to lack of communication. During the pour, they didn't use plywood to cover the grass (rare grass that I installed three months earlier), spilling concrete everywhere and requiring two pallets worth of grass to be replaced. I asked them during the forming to place all dirt on the neighbors yard for this reason. Half the price to replace his grass compared to mine. They didn't follow this instruction. They also broke two irrigation lines and tried to blame me for it. The first one they broke wasn't that big of a deal, the second one was already exposed and right next to the other break. How or why it happened, was due to carelessness (shown in photo).
Two days later, they came back to remove the forms and clean up. For some reason it was only the husband and wife and they didn't bring the rest of the crew. This caused them to not finish cleaning up and running late to pick up their kids. I told them they could come back later and finish cleaning up. Out of good faith I gave them payment and they refuse to return to finish. While taking photos of the mess to post here, I discovered that they didn't use a concrete vibrator to remove any air pockets and there are multiple voids in the retaining wall.
I would not recommend this company. They did a good job on the forms and rebar. But the lack of care and missing critical steps like the vibrator shows the companies inexperience. read more