Well I've never written a 1 star review before, but Jen and Susie inspired me. Here's what…read morehappened.
(TL/DR - Susie the cleaner left the mess untouched. I paid them for the job, then still had to do it myself. Jen the owner stands by that quality of work and thinks my expectations are unrealistic. Pictures attached, so judge for yourself.)
1. Due to character limits I'll zoom through the beginning: scheduling was a pain because Jen kept canceling/postponing. Our window had shrunk so small that what had originally been a whole-house job was changed into a specialized job: clean out the broken, warm, gross, smelly fridge/freezer, and then do whatever else you have time for.
2. Susie arrives to clean. I show her around, give her the backstory on the fridge. She seems personable and hardworking. I reiterate that everything else is secondary, and this fridge situation needs to be taken care of. It's starting to stink up the whole house. She is full of energy and on the case. I scamper back upstairs to avoid the smell, which is full-force with the fridge open, while she works.
3. Susie stays for 2 hours, I pay her $60 and tip her $20 for being such a trooper with the smell. I can see she's thrown some food in a trash bag, and she gave the rest of the downstairs a sweeping at least. She tells me to push my landlord for a new fridge, because this one will probably smell forever, no matter how clean it gets.
4. The fool I am, I never actually look inside to see if she really cleaned it. I focused on airing out the downstairs and didn't dare open those fridge doors again.
5. I get back in town a week later, and open the fridge. *SEE PICTURES* It had not been cleaned. Susie removed most of the food, and she put some of the shelves in the dishwasher, and... I don't know, I mean she must have done something else? It sounded like she was working. But nothing had been sprayed, nothing had been wiped, and not even the pools of gross liquid had been removed or sopped up. I found out later that while I was out of town, my roommate and the fridge repair guy found a burrito just lying in the warm freezer. Not that it's SO hard for them to pick it up and throw it away, but the whole point of this was taking care of the rotten smell. How are you helping the freezer's smell when you leave a rotten burrito in there? How are you helping the fridge's smell when there's still a pool of gross liquid in one of the door shelves? And since it's clear none of the fridge/freezer has actually been cleaned (sprayed, wiped, anything at all besides food removal, and it was already mostly emptied before she arrived), what exactly did she do with all that time?? What did I pay for here?
6. I text Jen about the issue, and send some pictures. She offers to have Susie come back sometime and finish. Honestly I would have been fine with that (if it was free), but at this point the fridge is fixed and we need to start using it, and scheduling was a big enough pain the first time around. I've got no choice but to clean it myself. I request a refund instead. Jen offers me a $30 credit.
7. Jen and I go back and forth over text. The bottom line for her is that I acknowledged beforehand that the whole job would not be completed. The bottom line for me was yeah, obviously she wasn't going to fit the original 5-6 hours of work into 2 hours, so I was willing to sacrifice things like the upstairs, or really anything else, but I was crystal clear to both of them - on the phone, in text, and in person - that the fridge was the job. That's what they were hired for, to clean it, make it ready for use again, and help with the smell as much as possible.
So that's it. My position is that even 1 hour is enough time to do the very basics, like fully empty the (mostly empty) fridge and remove pools of smelly liquid. I even think it's enough time to spray it down and wipe it a little. Given that the fridge itself was in the same condition it was before Susie arrived, I think calling this performance unsatisfactory is pretty fair. But Jen disagrees. She acknowledged Susie must have forgotten the burrito, but maintains there is no fault in failing to actually clean the fridge or alert me that it hadn't been cleaned, and that 2 hours is just how long it takes to throw out half a trashbag's worth of food, and I never should have expected them to get the job done in the first place. I guess this is business as usual for them.
Jen did give me a partial refund of $30, so I'm only out $50, plus doing the work I paid to have done. I feel like I dropped $50 to go out to eat because I didn't feel like cooking, then the restaurant served me a bowl of air, said that's just all they had time to make, and now I still have to go home and cook.
So if you hire these people you better be their friends or family, or else be prepared to check their work. I can't stand the thought of doing that, so I'll look for someone I can trust.
