MERCHANTS EAST

We had a very stressful situation with Whitney who is the owner of Merchants East. We bought our home in January of 2010 and hired her to decorate. She told us it would be finished by March and that even March was a conservative estimate. Well..by June we still did not have most of our furniture and we had planned on spending most of the summer there. Needless to say we were getting frustrated and shared our feelings with her though she continued at her leisurely pace. We had to ride her to get things done and make a list of things that needed to be completed. Some things were installed incorrectly and we had to ask her to have them repaired even though she was present during all installations and the errors should have been apparent to her. The last straw was when she sent us a bill for $80,000 out of the blue. This amount should have been billed throughout the 6 months she worked for us (as stated in the contract) but she "forgot" and billed us at the very end without any kind of heads up, "sorry I didn't bill you correctly", nothing. My husband almost had a heart attack. We found out later that she only uses her live in boyfriend for the construction work and his fee is 2-3 times higher that the average estimate in the area. She does not shop around for the best price and we have a strong suspicion that he is unlicensed. To top if off she gets 20% of his fee as her commission. We also found out that she has no formal training which of course is not a requirement but there are some things that had to be redone (at our expense) since they did not look right once put together. I think a professional should be able to visualize what is going to work and what is not going to work. To be fair the design work that she did turned out very nicely for the most part, but if I had it to do over again I would never ever use her.