Transformations

I recently had Rebecca Stage Our vacant home that was for sale in Portland Oregon and I couldn't be more Pleased! After several months on the market with no offers, Rebecca beautifully staged our home and we received an offer with 5 days!. The house looked Fabulous and Rebecca was wonderful to work with!. I would highly recommend her Services..

We had an serious dispute with, Rebecca Chute, Owner of Transformations, who staged multiple rooms of our 8000sq ft house for sale. We discovered fleas and carpet beetles last week, likely introduced by her furniture. We needed to spray the carpets before they spread. When we tried to discuss this with Rebecca she got quite insulted and removed all of her furniture from the home rather than work with us to figure out how to get rid of the pests she likely introduced. By her removing her staging furniture we are left with a huge staging bill and nothing to show for it except a room full of fleas! At the end of this letter are more details about the pests The house is just now being shown to buyers. We also have the loss of a potential sale of the home because now it's unstaged. In fact we had to turn away a prospective buyer last week. We have tried to work out a resolution to no avail. Rebecca has flatly refused any refund and says she "owes us nothing." We see the Design and Installation charge (over $6,900 in our case) as part of the overall staging process. We'd never pay that much money if the vendor was going to turn around shortly thereafter and remove everything! Rebecca sees it as a separate charge from the monthly rental and sees nothing wrong with pulling her furniture and props at a moments (in our case less than a day's) notice. Details about the fleas and timeline There?s no way to definitively prove where the pests came from but here?s what we know. Our house has been free of fleas and carpet beetles for the twelve years we?ve lived there. We haven?t had pets in the home for the last two years. Transformations installed their furniture June 18th. We tided up a few loose ends and then left the home empty mid July spending much of the summer at our vacation home. No other furniture was brought into the home besides Transformations?. There are only three adults living in the house and we don?t go camping or do anything near places where fleas congregate. When we returned to check on things August 13th we noticed dozens of small insects jumping around on the floor. We didn?t think too much of it (we thought they were springtails) but thought we?d have our pest control professional take a look. We called them Wednesday and the soonest they could come out was Friday 8/16 at 9am. The pest control guy gave us the bad news Friday that they were fleas! Dozens of them. He recommended that we treat them promptly before they spread. He also found a live Carpet Beetle in the living room and we found Carpet Beetle casings and insect parts and pet hair in the cracks of the Transformations couches. He also stated that the life cycle of the flea is approximately two months coinciding with the installation of the staging furniture. We vacuumed the whole house twice a day to keep the fleas under control but, because, we had staged furniture we wanted to talk to Rebecca first before spraying the carpets, which is the long-term solution. We put a call into Rebecca at noon Friday. She didn?t return the call. We called again on Saturday. She eventually sent an email that she was under the weather, could we send our concerns via email, which we did. Rebecca didn?t take kindly to the accusation that her furniture, area rugs, and props could possibly be the source of the infestation and refused to work with us to find a solution. She wouldn?t hear of us removing her furniture, spraying, and then returning it. Instead she unilaterally announced at 5:30pm Monday that she and her movers were showing up at 9:30am Tuesday to remove all of her furniture. On Tuesday we tried to reason with her one more time in person but her mind was made up. She removed furniture from the seven rooms in the house that she staged. We now have a big house that has furniture in only half of the rooms that we are trying to sell. We?ll have to pay another stager to come in, do a design, and start the whole process over. A word of warning about staging in general. Be sure you can work with your stager and they will take your tastes into account, especially if you are trying to live in the home while it's staged. Rebecca was very adamant about her choices and furnishing and, once it was done, she was on to the next project. It was hard to get any changes made and each one felt like an ordeal. Another warning about staging is you have no control about what furnishing they are putting into your home. Once you sign the contract, your opinion doesn't matter. They get to decide what quality of goods to bring in, their condition, etc.