HARDWOOD FLOORING TRADITIONS

We contacted at least five installers and this company could do it the soonest at the lowest cost. From the start Kelly, the owner, was extremely unprofessional. When he didn't show up to give us a quote he made excuses such as the following - "My employee just got a DUI." and "My other employee had a cyst on his butt and couldn't work." He also said that his sister in-law had passed away and he had been out of town for her funeral, this sounded legitimate. Kelly and crew came in on Tuesday morning and did the job in less than six hours. Finishing the job quickly is good but they sacrificed all quality of work. They did not cut off factory ends so there are many places where cracks could have been cut out but were not. They did not select the better pieces but put in whatever was on the top of the pile hence there are many rotten spots in the floor. All of this was disappointing but Kelly's response was the worst part. When we asked him to look at it and fix it, he said he would. Yet when we said we would wait to give him the payment until we were satisfied he made us feel we were being unreasonable. It was poor judgment on our part but we left him the check at the apartment where the new flooring was (we were not yet living there). From what we could tell he made a very brief attempt at starting to fix one of the spots we had labeled for him. He called us and said that he would be in the next day to finish. That was Wednesday. On Thursday he had an emergency, couldn't make it to the apartment and said he would finish it first thing Friday morning. We did not hear from him all day Friday. We called and left several messages since we were on a schedule and were planning to put poly (a finishing product) on the floors Saturday morning. It was on Friday that we discovered they had taken our hammer. It is a high quality tool with sentimental value. We were disappointed with the work and with the missing tool which we made clear in our messages. But they were not overly disdainful or aggressive, just stern. Kelly called us back on Monday claiming that he had been in Tennessee for his sister in-law's funeral since Tuesday. You will note that his company (and he told us he was there for at least part of the job) was at our apartment Tuesday morning installing the floors. And that he picked up our check on Wednesday morning. The two messages he left us on Monday confusing and did not resolve the situation. He told us that he was surprised and upset that we thought he had forgot his responsibility. He said that he would be willing to fix the piece of wood in our floors (there is more than one piece that needed to be fixed). He also told us that his crew accidentally took our hammer and he would return it. And the most juvenile part, he said he was so upset he would no longer take our calls. We left a message telling him it was too late to fix the floors but to please drop off the hammer at his earliest convenience. Its been a week - no hammer, no call.