I am trying to find a reliable, fairly inexpensive company/person to do some yard work for me. All I seem to find on here is related to Landscaping or Tree Trimming. I need someone who can do yard clean up, lay down some sod & some maintenance work for me.  Any recommendations in the East Bay?

go to any Orchard Supply or Home Depot.

Thanks Daniel but... not looking to pick up random guys with little English to come to my house you know?

check the pennysaver

yeah, i won't either.

It's funny because i was at OSH the other day buying a bunch of stuff for my yard and i was considering it for a few mins.

And i'm pretty sure that any 'landscaping' company would be able to help you with the things that you're describing. Landscaping nowadays seems to be a euphemism for yard work in a lot of cases.

I am very happy with Flores Landscaping, who do exactly the services you list, and more, at our 36-unit condo development.
I should write a review - but someone else has said basically what I would have said.
yelp.com/biz/flores-land…

I found my guy by driving around the neighborhood and noticing which companies/individuals were maintaining yards.  Explained what I wanted and how much I was willing to spend.

You can possibly break the job up and have one company do the clean-up and another lay sod.

I checked with Tom, and he is mostly in the west side of the bay, but hire a guy like this:

yelp.com/biz/chainey-hau…

To do the clean up, and haul away all the old debris and "Scrape" the yard clean for a do over. I have done sod, on several of my places, and you want a good sprinkler system installed first. Or you will end up with a lot of dead sod.

I have seen several jobs that gardeners have done, where they did a poor job on the sprinkler heads, and they were too far apart. Or too many heads on one loop. So get some references prior to hiring, or go look at some of their work.

I think there are two kinds of Gardeners. The blow and go guys and the ones that plant trees and lay sod. Don't be penny pinching, and get poor quality work.

One guy will cut costs by using the thin wall PVC pipe, when the Schedule 40 is not much more money. This sets you up for pipe failure when a pipe is hit or stressed.

That sounds like landscaping to me.

Someone else recommended this:

yelp.com/topic/berkeley-…

The best thing to do......on a random day, drive around and see which landscaping companies are doing work around your neighborhood.  You can view some of the work they do and they usually like to do work mulitiple properties on the same trip.

Our neighbor has a full clean up service.  One day I came home and all of my flowers were smashed to the ground on the side nearest her yard.  It turns out that the guy from the service was standing ON my flowers to work on my neighbor's.  I was a little bit angry.