I was torn between giving Amore a two or three star review, because our floors are done and mostly…read morelook good. I decided to go with a two star review, however, because of the incredible stress this experience caused my husband and I. I literally had to get a prescription for insomnia pills mid-way through this job because I was so stressed that I could not sleep.
Jim and his crew came highly recommended by our furniture maker, which is why we decided to hire them. But from the first day on the job, things began going very wrong. Here are some highlights:
This was a job that we were told would take 4.5 days. Instead, it took SEVEN WEEKS. Jim did not order the proper amount of wood, so we had to stop the job midway through to wait on more wood to arrive while we meanwhile had a big concrete hole in our kitchen. He also neglected to order base molding ahead of time, which caused further delays. When the base molding finally arrived, it was too thick for our space - it hangs over the door frames and looks awful. We wound up just accepting it because we were so worn down that we just wanted everything to be over.
On the first day of the job, a manager on Jim's crew wrongly told us we had bed begs, costing us a day of lost work while we freaked out, plus $300 for a bed-bug sniffing dog. We did not have bed bugs. This was a truly awful experience.
Jim was not present to oversee the work, and the Brazilian crew who did the demo and floor install were very sloppy. They damaged and scratched our walls, the repair for which Jim originally wanted to charge us nearly $800 for (we argued this out and he wound up covering it). The crew installed faulty boards, which had to be ripped out and replaced; installed boards that were not fully glued down and squeaked and moved when they were stepped on, which had to be replaced; and, in over a dozen places, actually damaged brand new boards that they had just installed by dragging and dropping our furniture - which again, had to all be replaced.
On one morning, one of Jim's main workers showed up, dumped some boards in our living room that were supposed to be installed that day, told us he was going to go park his car, and then disappeared. It turned out he had decided he just didn't want to do the job anymore.
The workers threw away a piece of our kitchen cabinet and they broke a pot and threw away the pieces, seemingly to hide the evidence. We insisted on being compensated for the pot and Jim had a piece of wood made to replace the missing cabinet part, but this just showed a general, worrying lack of care and responsibility on the crew's part.
In another instance, a worker opened our patio door in the middle of a tropical storm after we told him to keep the door shut. The door flew open, slammed against the wall and broke. When we called Jim to tell him about this, he exploded and started yelling at us, sayin that it wasn't his fault the door broke - "It's the wind's fault" - and that he wouldn't cover the repair. We wound up splitting the $1600 cost to fix the door, meaning we wound up footing an $800 bill because of his worker's sloppiness.
Jim did not tell us that we would have to hire someone separated to caulk and paint the base molding, which came as an unpleasant surprise. When our general contractor arrived to do the caulking and painting, he discovered that Jim's guy hadn't even installed the base molding correctly. We had to run out and buy a nail gun so he could fix it.
Jim agreed before the job that his crew would help us disassemble two pieces of furniture that were secured to the wall (a bed and cabinet). The crew then whined and complained about it, saying this is not their job (then why did they take the job??). In the end, they wouldn't even put the cabinet back on the wall - we had to get our general contractor do it, who easily reinstalled in.
These issues would have been a lot more tolerable had Jim's attitude been better. He repeatedly told us we were too involved and we were expecting too much. Any time we expressed dissatisfaction about something, Jim would literally yell at us and say we're unreasonable. Keep in mind, this is for a $40,000 job - in our home. It got to the point that my husband was having 45-minute yelling calls with Jim on a nearly daily basis, taking away from his and my ability to do our jobs and just live our lives. One morning, he called my husband at 7:30 am to yell about caulking. I heard my husband scream from the other room, "Do you know I have a job that isn't yelling at Jim!?" In 10 years of marriage, I literally had never heard my husband yell like that. It was extremely upsetting.
In my husband's last 45-minute call with Jim, he literally asked why we never thanked him for the job. That about sums it up. The good points are that Jim did finish the job - he did not disappear on us. He also did fix many of the damaged and problematic boards. But overall, the experience was just a nightmare.
