Wood floor installation from hell!

I wanted to wait and make my next post about our beautiful new floors with before and after pictures, but since that may be awhile, I’ll give you all the low-down on what’s going on.

The install started on Saturday morning, and we expected it to be a one day job. However, we were given wrong information and told it would take 3 days. Okay, no biggie. They got about 150 sqft. of 650 done, and said they’d be back on Sunday between 8:30 and  9:30.
End of day one.

Sunday rolls around and at 10:30am there are still no workers! Derrick calls and emails the owner of the company doing the install. He didn’t get a response until Monday morning. Apparently, one of the worker’s wife got into a bad car accident Saturday night, and the guy left a message with the exchange that he wouldn’t be able to come on Sunday or Monday. The owner didn’t get the message until Monday, so one day went by of our house looking like a mess with our furniture all over the place and dust and dirt clogging our lungs! And us thinking we’re getting screwed over and wondering if anyone will ever be back to finish this job.

We weren’t mad about the guy’s wife. That is understandable, but we were a little ticked the owner didn’t answer his phone on the weekend when he had a job going on. They said they’d make it right and sent out 2 new guys to finish the job on Monday. The guys get there and 30 minutes later tell Derrick that they can’t install the wood because it’s defective. WTF????? The planks are all different sizes and widths and it makes it very difficult to match up the planks so that there are no gaps. And why did no one tell us this yesterday! I honestly didn’t think the “gaps” were that noticeable in what they had already put down, and I thought it all looked normal. But the new guys installing it were concerned that they’d keep running into this and not have enough wood. And it’s going to take them way longer to complete.

We at this point thought they would have to pull up what they already laid down and we’d have to get a refund and buy our new wood elsewhere.  Meanwhile, our house still looks like this:

End of day two.
After a few phone calls, Derrick decides that we aren’t going to make a claim with Bellawood about the wood because they’ll just try everything they can to get out of a refund and then we’ll be stuck. He talked to the manager at Lumber Liquidators, where we bought the wood, and he said that this is normal and he’d give us 4 boxes at no charge to sift through to find good pieces to lay down. Great, thanks a lot! Wish we didn’t have to do that, but at least we’ll get the floors done, and it shouldn’t cost us any extra. The installers are also being very nice and not charging anything extra for the added work they’ll have to put into this.
End of day three.
Oh, did I mention that these new boxes have to acclimate in our house for a week before they can be installed? So until next week, our house will look like this:

Grrrrrrr……..

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