After doing a little research on carpet buying, we went with a local installer who could get carpet from a nearby mill. Everything went smoothly until the actual installation of the carpet (they seemed nice enough, pricing was competitive, etc.).
My wife had previously explained that we did want a certain area of the home carpeted and it didn’t get carpeted. They then told us that there wasn’t enough carpet left over to cover that area with the carpet we ordered. So we can either get different carpet placed there or we can pay more for carpet we thought we already bought.
Our other grievance was that the carpet layer left trash everywhere. I wouldn’t expect someone to sweep and vacuum and so forth, but there were huge scraps strewn throughout the house. This is in addition to a Jamba Juice cup left on the bathroom which is just unprofessional. The installer also took out some folding closet doors without replacing them. They were left in our bathroom. This would normally be just a nuisance, but when you’re already working under the stress of moving, it became a severe headache. (They told us later that it’s customary for a customer to remove these, but we were given no such instructions, even though my wife specifically asked if there was anything else we needed to do to prep the house).
The main point here is that people pay a lot for carpet labor. I understand that it’s rough work, but I would expect at least a sense of customer care. When my wife called to express our complaints, she was not treated like a valuable customer, but argued with over what was whose fault and so forth. Bad form, Ogden Carpet. Bad form.
March 6th, 2007 at 9:07 pm
As someone who does a lot of business with a lot of different vendors (including carpet and flooring guys) I can tell you that they DEFINITELY should have cleaned up and vacuumed after themselves. You have every right to complain to the company that their installer didn’t at LEAST pick up after himself. And they are perfectly capable of removing and then replacing the doors. More often than not we send our carpet guys to vacant houses we have never been to, so they do it ALL and we fully expect them to make sure the carpet is presentable to prospective buyers because we certainly aren’t going out there with a vacuum.
I have a lot of really strong opinions about how vendors should behave (we’re really picky). Can you tell?
March 7th, 2007 at 9:47 am
I get an e-mail notification everytime someone comments on our blog and it has been a Lewis filled morning. I’m glad we can be blog friends
March 15th, 2007 at 12:37 pm
[…] So it turns out that it’s not a bad idea to wait until AFTER the work is done for payment when hiring a contractor. As long as they already have your money, you’re at their mercy, but if you haven’t paid yet, they get the job done right or they don’t get paid. Ah, if only we could go back in time. It probably would have avoided a lot of unnecessary stress with our whole carpet fiasco. […]
March 27th, 2007 at 8:10 am
[…] So, you get a new house and you can’t just keep your old RCA, speaker-kit-in-a-box system. So I decide to venture out and try to put together my own set. I searched around for a while and finally stumbled upon a Pioneer 5.1 speaker kit (I’d link that but it’s not on the site anymore) on Overstock. It got to the house relatively quickly and I had it all unboxed on Saturday. Turns out, speakers don’t do much without a receiver though, so it was time to shop. I had considered a Yamaha at Best Buy, but the store didn’t have it in stock and I didn’t want to wait for it to arrive via UPS ground. I wound up going with a Pioneer 7.1 x 100 watts/channel receiver which has 3 digital audio inputs and component video switching abilities (no HDMI at this price range) for $200 at an RC Willey Outlet store (the service was great, maybe we should have used these guys for carpeting). It had to come down from Salt Lake, so I didn’t get it until that evening, but that’s OK. […]