
Our Company Heritage
We are and always have been a small company with an emphasis on quality workmanship
and customer satisfaction. Hurth Construction, Inc. was incorporated
in 1994. The vast majority of our work is residential and
commercial waterscape and landscape construction, but we also provide landscape maintenance
services for our regular clients.
Our
company is owned and operated by Doug & Lisa Hurth. We are a small
company run by a handful of serious pond specialists and enthusiasts.
We all love the water garden industry, we all have ponds at home, we all
wear multiple hats and perform any and all tasks that need to be done
and we all know the ins-and-outs of the water garden lifestyle and can
talk with you for hours about your pond. Please give us a chance to
introduce you to the life changing beauty and peacefulness of a water
garden. Dan Dumas is our Operations Manager, and he has a hand in
almost everything that goes on here. In addition to operations, Dan is
also our sales, marketing, and public relations manager. Many of you
will get the opportunity to meet Dan at your own home when he arrives
for a sales and design consultation. Dan has had an eye for layout and
design from the beginning and he personally designed our website and
much of our advertising that you see. While he does not have an
extensive landscape background, he has been studying hard and he has
really caught on to the art of water garden and landscape layout and
design and uses his creative eye almost daily to design unique backyard
paradises for our clients. Carrie Dumas is our retail and office
manager and she handles everything that goes on in our store and
offices. She does it all; from the accounting and bookwork to hand
selecting the beautiful fish that we sell in our store. Carrie is a
retail management professional and also an avid water gardener with
plenty of hands on pond, fish, and plant experience to make your trip to
the
HURTH Waterscapes Retail Showplace
a satisfying, enjoyable and educational experience. When you stop in to
our store, please be sure to find Carrie or Dan and ask them any
questions that you might have regarding your pond and waterfall. They
are both very knowledgeable and always eager to talk about ponds.
Chances are, when you call our offices, you will either speak to Doug,
Dan, or Carrie, your personal waterscape and landscape specialists. We are
always here to serve you!
We feel that being a smaller,
tightly held company gives us certain advantages over the larger
companies. We usually have only one or two projects going at any one
time, which allows us to more closely monitor each project. We can
be more flexible and creative when it comes to planning, designing and
implementing a landscape. We will work closely with each client to
be sure that their landscape is their own, not just a cookie cutter
replica of the landscape down the street. We will treat your
landscape project as if it were our own. And last, but certainly not
least, we will be personally committed to successfully completing your
project in a manner that best suits your needs and desires.
Years Bring Change
In
1994 we installed our very first naturally-balanced ecosystem pond and
judging from the absolute delight and excitement that our clients and
all of their neighbors felt toward the new pond, we knew that we were on
to something big. From that day forward, we made it our mission to
become the water garden experts in Wisconsin. We have educated
ourselves and continually educate ourselves on both artistic design
principals and intricacies as well as all of the latest construction
theories and techniques. We have been involved in many projects, both
large and small and have installed many different styles and types of
ponds and waterfalls and our enthusiasm hasn't waned one bit. As a
matter of fact, I think that we are more excited now than ever. The
water garden industry just keeps getting bigger and better and we try
very hard to remain on the cutting edge.
By
2006, after years of being asked where to go to buy pond related
products, we decided that it was time to give our customers a place to
shop for their pond products. We bought our building at 150 N.
Riverside Drive in Saukville and opened a water garden and landscape
retail showplace where people can go to experience the lifestyle and
purchase any and all pond related products that they need. We still
called our company Hurth Construction, Inc. and we called our new retail
store Ponds Plus. The retail store was a great success and we got loads
of compliments from clients, new and old. After much debate and since
now, eight years after taking the plunge, the majority of our work is
installing and maintaining water gardens, we decided that it was time to
change our name. We sensed confusion over the two different names and
the fact that people always thought construction meant that we built
houses. We looked at our letterhead and realized that inadvertently, we
had made this more confusing than it had to be.
So we
kicked off the 2007 season with our new company name,
HURTH Waterscapes.
We received some
great customer feedback and some new recognition due to our name
change. We feel that the new name
portrays our specialty and our focus very well. Over the 2007 season,
everyone grew accustomed to the new name and now it feels like a natural
fit. 2007 was a season of other changes for our company as well. We
finally put into writing our “Best in the Industry” 10 year
workmanship warranty. We had been standing behind our top quality
work since we started in the landscape industry, but now we put it in
writing. This new warranty seemed to be a real hit with our prospective
clients, but it wasn’t such a hit with our competitors!
Evidently our competitors thought that this warranty was just crazy, and
I suppose it would be crazy for companies out to make a quick buck, but
we plan on being here for the long run, and to stand behind our work and
serve our clients needs seems like an easy decision. In 2007 I made the
commitment to personally work in the field as the crew foreman. I had
always overseen our projects, but this was the first year in quite a few
years that I had actually worked each day all day with the crew. I had
battled for years to find the right foreman who cared about beauty,
quality, our clients and efficiency, but I never found that person. I
had come to the conclusion that very few people care about artistic
creativity and quality of product the way that I do, so the clear choice
was for me to do it myself. I am the one with the artistic vision and
no one cares more about quality and customer satisfaction than I do. I
have to say that I had a great season. Sure, it was a lot more
physically demanding than my sales and office work that I had grown
accustomed to, but it sure was worth it. I had a great season, the
clients received a great product and our artistry and efficiency has
grown as well. Being in the field every day allowed me time to really
think about the ponds that we build and the way that we build them. I
was able to become more creative, take the time to do the little things
that make a big difference, and improve our processes and procedures as
well. 2007 was also the first year that we were able to sell a good
quantity of work for the winter months. In the past we had plowed snow
which turned out to be a rather tedious break-even kind of process for
us. In 2007, in lieu of snow removal, we implemented a winter work
discount program to encourage people to purchase our services to be
performed during the winter months. This worked out just great, and
even now, in February, as I type this, we are in the middle of a pond
and patio installation job. It has been great to keep the construction
flowing, and as long as we prepare ourselves and understand that we need
to work around Mother Nature a bit more, working during the winter when
most landscapers are hiding indoors has been great. We were given an
outstanding opportunity in 2007 when we were hired to renovate one pond
and build another pond for the House on the Rock in Spring Green
Wisconsin. This turned out to be a fabulous job just overflowing with
creativity and challenge. The people at the House on the Rock have been
great to work with and the ponds turned out truly beautiful. This
project excited us, challenged us, cemented our name a bit more as the
pond and waterfall experts of Wisconsin, and continues to challenge us
into 2008 with yet another pond project to build. As you can see, 2007
was quite a year for us and we all eagerly anticipate the magic that the
2008 season will bring.
New Year's
Resolutions
We are
all very excited for the 2008 season to begin, and we are anticipating
yet another year of great change. We are working very hard to improve
our company to better serve our clients and 2008 should be a banner
year. It has already started in a very different way than any year
prior to this. This is the first year that we are actively working on
construction projects prior to April. I am not sure why we haven't done
this in the past; it really isn't difficult or unpleasant to work
outside in the winter as long as you prepare yourself for it. The
biggest problem with the winter work is still trying to find time to do
all of the organizational work that we usually do over our winter. This
year we will be changing the way we do things a bit and offering our
clients more choices. In the past, like most companies in this
business, we have installed many ponds using bio-falls and skimmer
boxes. These boxes are promoted as necessary items in a natural
ecosystem pond, but the truth is that with our extensive field
experience, I have developed several new and improved ways of doing
things. I have developed a way to eliminate both the bio-falls and
skimmer boxes, create an even better balanced pond, and a pond with a
much more natural look and feel. We like to call this our
Natural Flow System™.
No longer must we look at artificial skimmer covers and protruding
bio-falls boxes. There are less man made parts to hide, less man made
parts to wear out and better filtration and pond balance to boot. We
are also using the newly developed
Constant Water Exchange
system to keep our ponds full, instead of the typical problematic
auto-fill valve of years past. Rather than installing an auto-fill
valve with multiple moving parts to fail, we will be installing a small
adjustable valve which will allow a very minute amount of water into the
pond all day everyday. This new
CWE System
has many advantages, including less maintenance, better water quality
and ease of use. By adding a slight trickle of water into the pond at
all times, we eliminate the need for sticky fill valves that either get
stuck on to flood our ponds, or stuck off to deprive our ponds of
water. With the new system, we are constantly renewing the water, but
at a very slow and slight rate. This will keep our ponds topped off at
all times and keep the water a bit more refreshed than usually, making
it healthier for our fish. Don't worry, if you want the traditional
pond items, we will still be building ponds using the traditional
methods, but if you want the latest and greatest, we will offer you that
as well. We are also working on some new improvements to our store and
will be unveiling some new water features in April when we open. We
have developed new client referral programs with incentives to hopefully
inspire our existing wonderful clients to help us find more wonderful
people to introduce to the fabulous water garden lifestyle. We will
also be completing our final pond project at the House on the Rock.
This final pond will be in front of the newly constructed welcome center
and will be called the oriental pond. We are not sure of all of the
details yet, but know that it will be a sight to behold. Tom Kupsh, the
project visionary has described it as more whimsical than the previously
completed Japanese pond complete with a pine tree island and a waterfall
bursting through a wall. Through all of these changes, we hope to
increase the quality of every job that we do as well as improve each
customer contact that we make. We excitedly head out into the 2008
season armed with a passion for ponds and a firm belief that quality and
customer service will be the cornerstones on which our business is built
now and far into the future.
Over
the past decade we have jumped head first into the wildly-expanding
water garden industry. We are committed to being the absolute best
water garden contractor and retailer in Wisconsin. We are the people to
go to when you are considering pond, water garden, waterfall or wetland
construction of any kind.
Ponds are our Passion!
Since first getting into the pond industry, we have certainly been
bitten by the water gardening bug. The team at
HURTH Waterscapes
absolutely loves designing and installing water features! It is the
most creative and inspiring work that we do. As the President of HURTH
Waterscapes, I don't know how I went for so many years without a water
garden at my house. I can honestly say that I would never again live in
a place without a pond. A water garden makes a fabulous addition to any
yard. It is hard to convey or even understand what a significant
difference the sights and sounds of a pond and waterfall make to a yard,
but believe me when I say that you should definitely give it a try.
Install a completely natural eco-system water garden in your yard now
and you will not regret it. As a matter of fact, I would be willing to
bet that you too will decide that you couldn't live without your water
garden.
Our Commitment to
Excellence
Now that we have told you what
we will do, we will tell you what we will not do: We
will not start your project and then disappear with no trace.
We will not dump a bunch of materials in your driveway and then not
show up for two or three days. We will not leave you with a
huge mess to clean up when we leave. We will not give you a
low estimate to get the job and then raise our prices as the job
progresses. We will not intentionally under sell a project so
that we can load it up with extras later. We will not
surprise you with a list of extra charges at the end of the project.
We will not avoid phone calls for warranty work. We will
not leave you with faulty, unfinished work.
We believe that having
landscape work done on your property should be a pleasant and positive
experience. As our client, this is your chance to customize your
outdoor environment to best suit your needs. We will work closely
with you to ensure that your property will be everything that you want and
need it to be. From the initial meeting to the final billing, you
will be treated with the utmost respect. If you have any questions or concerns regarding any aspect of
the project, all that you need to do is call us and we will be at your
service to help in any way that we can.
Give us a chance
to create your very own ultimate outdoor living space and rest assured
that you are in the best hands.
Ponds are our Passion!

Sincerely,
Doug Hurth, President
HURTH
Waterscapes
Call us today and set up
an appointment for an expert consultation, or visit our
Contact Information
page
and take the next step towards enjoying you own ultimate outdoor living
space!
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