Woman Shares Landscaping Fail After Paying $4,000 for Privacy Fence: 'Went Downhill' (Exclusive)
"It looked like I could have done it, which is exactly what I didn't want," content creator Maddie Perry tells PEOPLE of a professional landscaping project that went terribly awry
Maddie Perry
The rendering (left), the final resultA Nashville content creator is sharing the expectation versus the reality of her $4,000 investment into what a landscaping company said would be a privacy fence shrouded in various trees and hydrangeas.
Content creator Maddie Perry shared a video on TikTok showing the rendering given to her by a Nashville-area landscaping company — and the end results once she paid the company more than $4,000 to complete the job.
"This was my expectation," Perry says in the video, gesturing to the rendering, which showed a fence fully covered by a row of full trees, circular bushes and lush hydrangeas,
"And this is what I got," Perry then says with a laugh, showing a photo of the end result — a row of unevenly spaced, extremely sparse trees that measure roughly one foot tall. The fence that she was looking to cover with plants remains clearly visible in the final photo, with Perry adding: "I hate being an adult."
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Perry tells PEOPLE she had been looking for additional privacy along the fence in her backyard, which she shares with a neighbor.
"I had heard good things about this particular landscaping company (another local influencer actually posted about them a few months before) and I had them come out to give me an estimate," Perry says.
The landscaper "measured the length of the fence and said I would need about 6 trees and 9 hydrangeas to fill the space," Perry says.
He then sent her the rendering, along with a $6,500 quote.
"I said my budget was around $4,500 and he lowered the price without changing any of the tree amounts or sizes," Perry says, "which I thought was odd but I went with it."
Maddie Perry
The renderingFrom there, however, "it just went downhill."
The landscaper asked Perry to pay in full in order to get a date scheduled for the installation, so she did.
"After that, my point of contact was extremely hard to get a hold of — he stopped responding to my texts and never scheduled an install date," she tells PEOPLE.
Eventually, the landscaper did come, though the crew that came on install day "had no idea where anything would go [or] what the plan was," Perry says.
"I had to walk them through the concept and they got to digging," Perry says. "It only took about 15 minutes, which was shocking to me because I thought they had a lot of labor to do."
Once she saw the finished product, however, she understood why it didn't take much time.
"Not only were the 'super trees' and 'large hydrangeas' nothing like what was pictured in my quote, but they were planted in a crooked line and there was absolutely zero landscaping done," Perry says. "Rather than providing a neat line of mulch like the quote suggested, they simply dug holes and left it at that. It looked like I could have done it, which is exactly what I didn't want and why I hired a professional to do it."
Maddie Perry
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While Perry concedes that the small shrubs planted will eventually grow into trees, she says that the end result is "unacceptable," particularly when taking into account how much she paid.
"It will probably be 4-5 years for the trees to be the size of the ones in the initial quote. Not to mention, the six trees and nine flowers were not nearly enough to fill the space along the fence," she says.
While Perry hasn't publicly named the landscaper — and says she is unsure if he's seen her viral video on TikTok — she says she did email the company to express her disappointment. She still hasn't heard back.
And while she regrets the expense, she adds that the experience taught her an important lesson.
"Unfortunately, I have learned the hard way that good help can be hard to find and I will be tackling the backyard on my own now," she says.
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