Marshall's Hardwood Floors

They did finally refund our money in small claims mediation. Claimed it was the product. Had someone else redo them the third time and they look beautiful.

Horrible. These guys either don't know how to do a good job or they didn't care to. One of the problems with Angie's List in the Yakima area is there are very few provider reviews, so when we decided to talk to someone about refinishing our floors, we hit the yellow pages. The ad for Marshall's said they'd been serving Central WA since 1957 so I gave them a call. We set up an appointment with Fred. He showed up when he said he would and gave us what we felt was a reasonable bid. (I gave them an "F" because the final product wasn't worth the price) They could get started fairly soon and, since we really didn't know who else to call, we gave him the job without getting other bids. He struck us as someone who'd forgotten more about hardwood floors than a lot of people know. Of course, Fred doesn't do the work. That's left up to Fred's son Doug and two other men on their crew. Things started off ahead of schedule. We hired some guys to move our furniture the day before the start date. Fred called early that morning and said they were dropping off one of the crew members to get started sanding the edges. It was lucky I was there, because I live in another town a couple hours drive away. We plan to live in the Yakima home when we retire. When they dropped the guy off, Fred and the rest of the crew came in to have a look. This is the only time I saw or spoke to foreman Doug until we paid them off. Fred called about a week later and said they were finishing up with the stripping part of the project. He called to discuss repair alternatives in one area. I took the lower cost alternative and, ironically, this is one of the best looking areas on the new floors. About a week after that I called Fred back for a status report. He told me they had put on the first coat that day and were going to decide the next day whether to try to do two coats that day (a Friday) or to do the third coat on the following Monday. I asked him to call back after they decided. No callback. My wife and I had been planning to go over and check out the project anyway, so we drove over that Friday evening. We found the floors hadn't been refinished at all: they were about half done with the final sanding. We also discover they were storing their sanders in the bathrooms that had been recently remodeled rather than on a nearby porch. They'd also been mixing their putty in our sinks and hadn't bothered to clean them up (actually they never did). We found it a little unnerving that Fred was giving us bad information, but decided he'd probably gotten an optimistic report from the crew. I gave Fred the opportunity to call me the following Monday, but he didn't. I called him on Tuesday. He seemed defensive ("your floors were in much worse shape than we thought," etc) and didn't really explain the discrepancy or why he didn't call me back. He did say the first two coats would be applied later that week and the third the following Monday. We went to Yakima again that weekend and the floors did have finish on them. The work was horrible (more on that later). Two specific problems were a bad board and the putty: when I was younger and had limited funds, I used white wood putty to fix the surface before I painted the floors. Marshall's just sanded the suface and put finish on it. One area looked like someone had splattered white paint on it. I called Fred that Monday and let him know we weren't happy with the job. He said they'd look at the board and the putty, but assured me the finished floors would be much nicer after application of the final coat and the floors were buffed. Next weekend: I'll admit the floors looked better: on a scale of 1 to 10 they went from 1 to 2. They did a half-hearted job of "fixing" putty and totally ignored the bad board. The finish is a disaster: there are areas where the finish is pooled up right next to areas that seem to have been missed at least once. Our dining room looks like someone spilled a can of pop on it. That's one of the things I'd mentioned to Fred in my earlier complaint call. There are trails of finish drops, finish slopped onto the quarterround, etc. etc. Marshall's poor quality of work was matched by their lack of professionalism: They moved our stove to get to the 220 service and didn't move it back or plug it in. They burned out another 220 circuit breaker and didn't bother to tell us. They left cigarette butts in our yard and putty on our porch as well as the sinks. But my favorite is: someone wearing boots tracked finish across our non-hardwood kitchen floor. This is no big deal as we're going to remodel the kitchen, but Marshall's didn't know that. We'd already hired the movers to put our house back together and we had a large group of family showing up the following weekend. There was really no time to fix it and we didn't think Marshall was able, let alone willing, to try. We decided to just pay them off with as little drama as possible. While we were doing that, Doug mentioned a special floor care product and said he'd drop some off at the house. He didn't.