The Hardwood Stop

If I could give zero stars I would. They called me the same week as we had an appointment for Wednesday. Said the wood needed another day to acclimate to the weather. I allowed the BS excuse and we moved it to Thursday. I get a call at 4:55pm Wednesday. We are already moved our kids stuff out of his bedroom. And another room. The manager tells me that they didn’t finish the job that day and they couldn’t come to me Thursday. I asked why I was hearing this at 5pm. She told me that they guys come back ti the office and tell her at 5 pm if they finished the job. I asked if they had phone. She said of course they did. But could not explain why I was hearing about this after we had overhauled our house. Just a lack of professionalism and common sense. That is the stupidest system I have ever heard of. Now we aren’t guaranteed till Monday. Getting a refund and starting over.

I highly recommend The Hardwood Stop for all of my installation needs. Owners, Miguel and Michele are both the utmost professionals and provide excellent service and top-quality installation of all types of flooring. They’re the best!

Terrible...I had an appt at 3pm with a 1 hour window. At 4:15 their rep called me and said she is 45 min away and was going to cancel appt, go back to office, call me and reschedule appt. I waited til 6:30, never received a call and emailed the owner about the terrible customer service.

Everything started out pretty rocky. Lumber Liquidators told me the flooring would take 7-10 days to acclimate, but that the installer would come by to test the moisture to see exactly when it would be ready. Miguel, from the Hardwood Stop, when he came to measure told me that it would be 7-14 days to acclimate; but that someone would come by to measure the moisture and see when it was ready. When asked how long the wait was, he said that there wasn't a wait for installation; the only wait was for the wood to acclimate. As a result I bought all the supplies that Lumber Liquidators said I would need, and that Miguel checked the list; and I e-mailed the Hardwood Stop to get a quote and see when someone would come by to check the moisture. Every time I e-mailed or called Michelle it would take her a minimum of 24 hrs to get back to me, and a few times it was a day-and-a-half. She finally informed me that it would be a minimum of three weeks before anyone came to install my flooring and that moisture wouldn't be checked. Having a deadline in two weeks, I complained and after a few more lengthy back and forths eventually talked to Julia. Without admitting that Michelle said anything wrong, Julia explained that two weeks was the max for my engineered floooring (3 weeks is for solid bamboo) and it was fine to schedule my installation and that someone "Would be calling me soon". Three days later I called her, because no one had called me. By the end-of-the-day I finally had an appointment, and Julia had restored some of my faith in the company. At this point it was almost three weeks from the point where I picked up the stuff. On the day of installation two installers showed up early for the installation and seemed extremely professional and like they knew what they were talking about. Besides the complaint from one of my employees that they kept peeing on the seat, everything seemed well. The flooring was installed and initially looked good, but I honestly didn't know how to tell "good installers". Then my electrician came back to install the electrical outlets. While most flooring installers carry both a table-saw for the majority of cuts, and another saw for cutting curved cuts; these installers did not. As a result they had no way to do a consistent cut around the circular floor outlets. (See photo attached. The white stuff is the caulk I had to install). What this meant is that there straight cuts results in no space around some parts of the outlet, and as much as 1/2" in other parts. The problem is the flooring cover only overlaps 5/16". This meant there was as much as 3/16" exposed around the edge. If this was consistent around the entire outlook it might not have looked as weird, but as you can see its all jagged. I called to complain and they sent back the originally installer to look at it. He insisted over and over again that everything in the install was done correctly. He took photos and sent to his manager for review. 45 minutes later I called the company because no one had reached out to me, and not having this flooring fixed was holding up the final electrical inspection and a whole chain of other work. It took a number of calls back and forth but ultimately the Hardwood Stop told me that the manufacturer instructions specifically state there should be a minimum of a 1/2" gap around all static objects, and therefore since this was less than 1/2" they would not be fixing it. Take into mind that not a SINGLE gap in the entire installation was even 1/2", but they were using this as an excuse as to why this is fine. The ONLY flooring jack stocked by the local commercial electrical supply has a 5/16" overlap. Lowes has a slightly larger cover, but it goes with a larger electrical box and would not work here. I was presented with two options: 1) Pay them to redo the work they had messed up. 2) Find somewhere with a larger cap. If #2 was actually a possibility I would have gone with it, but it proved not to be an option. As a result I had to go with option #3, "Deal with the hole". I chose to fill it with caulk in hopes it made it a little less obvious. If there had been a consistent spacing around the entire outlet, I'd understand the argument that there was simply a conflict of specifications here. It also would have looked much more intentional when I caulked it that there was the same bead of caulk evenly around the whole outlet. However, as you can see from the photo, it was not consistent at all, and the "specifications of 1/2" really only mattered to them when they wanted to cite it". As a result their complaint about being "specifications" was simply an argument to avoid having to have someone do 2-3 hrs of work redoing work that should have been done right the first time. No installer would have left these gaps in their own office/house, as a result they should not have left it in mine. I have no doubt this company can do beautiful work a good percentage of the time. However, everyone makes mistakes sooner or later. The mark of a great company is how they handle their failures. This company clearly looks for a way that they don't have to deal with it. Make your own choice based on that, but I definitely won't use them again. You never know when you're going to be the customer that something is messed up for.

Michelle came out to do the quote. She was all business and highly competent. The work crew was another story. We moved the contents of our home into our garage to make it easy for the install crew. The crew set up their saw inside our garage. As a result the entire contents of our home were covered in sawdust. We were advised that the job would be a 3 day job and the crew rushed through it in a day and a half. after they left we found glue spots everywhere. It was soluble glue, but we had them back out to clean it. After they left we had to re-clean it again. Four weeks later we go out to get something out of our deep freeze in the garage to find they had unplugged the deep freeze when working and never plugged it back in. A month's worth of sour spoiled meat. Not good. Additionally the crew were smoking outside our home and left cigarette butts everywhere in our landscape for us to clean up. Would not use again. Michelle is their only redeeming quality.

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