Treeborn Floors

We just took a referral a couple months ago from a commercial painter who painted the inside of our house, and he did an excellent job. We just acquired a new, old house and we decided since we're having the inside painted we'd have the wood floor refinished and he recommended a guy. The guy that I know and I play golf with, who's a pretty good friend, but he was in the basement/cement/poured-wall type basement wall business for 30 some years and he just sold his business but he heard that we were looking for that and he referred the same guy. So 2 completely unrelated places within a week say oh yeah you definitely want to have this guy come over. So we got his phone number from both people and we kept calling for about 2 weeks and he never called us back. So about Mother's Day my wife is giving him one last try, thinking she's going to leave a voice message and he answers the phone. I thought my wife was leaving a voicemail and I hear her say well is that good or bad. I'm like what the heck you know. And then she's telling him what time she can meet him so I figured she had somebody on the phone; didn't know where the conversation was going. The guy's name was Mike Lance. The reason he didn't get back to us is that he had, you might already have comments on him, but I should have done something along rating him because he doesn't have any of that marketing stuff going. He has done real high-end stuff, but he's sort of a down-to-earth blue collar business man and they were doing the Flint Michigan Capital Theaters so that was a big job for a small company so it took a while and he said he was working like 12-14 hour days and weekends to have it come in on time and he apologized he just kept forgetting. The reason my wife responded the way she did is the guy says, when she told him her name, he says no relation to the old football coach from the 70's at a community High School and she goes is that good or bad, because he played for me. She got out there, met him; I didn't see him until I had to pay him. I went in during the final end and the final inspection and he didn't accept any money until after we were satisfied that it looked right. And basically made the confirmation and I trust him that if we find something wrong after the fact that he'll come back and touch it up or whatever. We're just thrilled! I mean it's excellent, looks brand new. It looks excellent. I mentioned it to my neighbor across the street who is retired 38 years in our community school district and he's a client of mine and good friend/neighbor. And I mentioned the irony of getting this guy and he says oh sure you should have asked me. He says we had our floors done and I said yeah who'd you have and he says, his Dad. His Dad is excellent. So the kid took over the Dad's businesses. The kid worked with his Dad through high school and then basically worked with his Dad and then took it over. So he's been doing it for 40 years and he's in his mid-50's. So it's like he's got a good 10 more years left I think. He looks like he's in pretty good shape still; hard worker & busy guy. He deserves the good rating and good marketing. I think he probably doesn't need a whole lot of help you know as far as that because he's getting the word of mouth. Like you say, people that don't know about him or wouldn't come across him because they haven't had the benefit of having somebody that's needed it and done it. I happened to just be lucky enough to get that. It was like we weren't gonna put the extra money into it and the thing was I thought he was quite reasonable for what happened. I expected to pay somewhere between $2-$4,000 for the floor and that's what the painter estimated and I think I paid $1250 or something. That's the other thing he gives you a lot of benefit and then the wood floor went into the laundry room, out to the garage. So we had to move the washer and dryer out to the garage and we haven't moved into that house yet. But he says whenever you're ready to have us re-set the equipment you just give me a call and I'll come right back out and do it. Normally they just leave and it's like okay if you don't want us to do it now we won't do it later. It was about a month ago that he finished. It was a good situation because we didn't have to avoid using the house. Well we were not using the house. We just had to not walk on the floor for a couple days. Then he called and it was a little bit humid and we had a little bit of rain and he said he went back and it wasn't quite done for him to put the finished coat on. So he says I'm going to give it a couple more days. It was like he didn't rush it done you know so we might not have had quite as good of a finish to it. He did a good job. I think he rushed it. He got in earlier or he pushed us up. He was going to go away or something like that.

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