Staged to Perfection LLC

I met with Jeanne and she discussed the terms of the contract which would come to $1200 for staging and three months of rental. Each month thereafter would cost $500. When I looked over the contract it stated that $1200 would cover only two, and not the agreed upon three, months of rental fees. At the direction of my real estate agent Jeanne corrected the contract. After signing the corrected contract Jeanne began staging and suggested I rent a small storage unit to empty the closets of personal items. Before the staging was completed Jeanne decided that she could not use all of my furniture and asked if I could store a few large pieces at a neighbors unit. I said that I could not and Jeanne offered to store them at her warehouse for several hundred dollars a month. I asked her to try to use the pieces as I had already gone through the trouble and expense of following her directions in renting a small storage unit to clear out the closets. After the staging I noticed Jeanne's crew had rolled a wooden table top on its side damaging the finish and placed a screw in the wood ceiling beams to hold up a large floor mirror which also damaged the wood. Jeanne denied she damaged anything. In January 2011 my real estate agent went on vacation and could not show the unit. Graciously she insisted on paying the staging rental fee for that month. For the following two months Jeanne insisted she never received the check and demanded the payment from me. It was not until my real estate agent produced a copy of the cashed check that Jeanne admitted receiving it. In the next few months I requested invoices for the monthly fee so that I could claim the expense on my taxes...but to no avail. Jeanne frequently would reply that she mailed the invoices or emailed the invoices. She then sent an email saying she didn't have to send me invoices because payment was due per our contract. Eventually I did receive two of the four invoices I requested. After 7 months of staging and not one offer I decided the staging wasn't cost effective and canceled the contract. On the day Jeanne and her crew de-staged the space she texted me several times to ask if various pieces of furniture were hers or mine. Upon returning to the unit I discovered Jeanne had taken several pieces of furniture that did not belong to her despite previous confirmation. I called her and she said she would return them the next day. When I called the next day her phone was turned off. After answering hours after she said she would deliver the items "mistakenly" removed she stated her assistant was supposed to return them hours before and she did not know where he was. I told Jeanne this unacceptable and I would call the police. She hung up and less than one minute later her assistant called...from Jeanne's own cell phone. Her assistant said he would return the items at 10 o'clock at night because he was working at a job. I left a family barbecue early to return home to meet Jeanne's assistant. He called once to say he was lost. He said he was in the neighborhood less than a mile away. I gave him directions. He arrived almost one hour later at 11 o'clock. Happy this nightmare was over I went to sleep. The next day Jeanne sent a scathing email stating I made her assistant wait until 11 o'clock, that she was a professional woman, and I never had a right to threaten calling the police. This experience has left me very wary of the staging profession. I understand that there are many honest people who put pride in what they do for a living. But I would be reluctant to hire a staging company in the future. I implore you to save a lot of money, time, and aggravation, and never give this "professional woman" your business.