This review has been a long time coming because I really just wanted to forget the entire experience. Some of it was pretty good, though not great and the rest was just plain terrible.
The Good.. eh, the Okay:
The people who work in the showroom were helpful and professional. We came in thinking that we knew what we wanted but ended up realizing that type of flooring wasn't going to work for us. We ended up going with bamboo, which btw - is very beautiful and tough. Five months in and there's not a scratch on it.
If the entire experience ended with the showroom experience this would've been a 4 star review. Not a 5 star as one thing happened that turned me off and should've been a red flag warning sign, but at the time I didn't heed it.
When ordering the flooring etc, it came to too much, more than we expected by about $2000.00. I didn't think we could afford it and expressed my disappointment. That's when he 'realized' that he had overcharged us for the stair riser and peds, that took $1400 off the top.
So, on to the very, very bad.
The installation process. We had bamboo in the living room, dining room, hallway, two flights of stairs and another small hallway installed.
The flooring and other accoutrements were delivered and a date was made for install. The flooring has to acclimate and we were in no hurry for the install so the date was set about 4 weeks out.
In order to have the flooring installed we had to empty all of those rooms of furniture, not a small task.
About 10 days after the delivery the sub contractor that LL works with called and wanted to do the install.... tomorrow. Oh, BTW, the call came in at 6pm, they wanted to be there at 8am the next morning. WTH? No! We advised them that the original install date would be just fine.
Date of install comes by and a man shows up at our door. One man. He says he's the team. He barely speaks English. I think his name was Yuri. He says the install will take 3 days.
Yuri spends the first day doing demo on the carpet and old wood floor.
Second day, Yuri comes back tells us our floor is uneven, it will take 10 bags of leveler, that will be $30 a bag and $60 a bag for labor. $900 or he leaves and never comes back.
So we pay.
He leaves and doesn't come back until the next day, Wednesday. He is in our home for perhaps 3 hours, lays leveling compound and leaves.
The next day, Thursday, he starts the install.
Friday, he says he'll be finished around 1:30. I take a late lunch, go home to do a walk through and he's not even close to done, but he keeps indicating that he'll be done in 1/2 an hour. Of course, I'm not really sure how much he understood because he didn't speak English fluently. When I asked him, 'how well do you speak English", he replied, "Yes".
I ended up taking the rest of the day off because he honestly had no idea when he'd be finished.
Then came the point when he said it was finished. It was a mess. The showroom employee had told us that when the installer finished it would be "move in ready". It was no such thing.
Even to this day there are seams that are hard to look at because they are so uneven. I took photographs and sent them to his boss - who also seemed to speak very little English. He and Yuri had a long phone conversation in their own language about the shoddy workmanship while Yuri yelled and screamed into the phone. Yuri then got off the phone and told me he would do me a favor for free and finish the trim work. Which he did... mostly. But the seaming in the finish work is still a sight to see.
There's nothing, "move in ready' about his work. If this were a new construction the builder would be calling the contractor to get his behind back to the site to fix the trim seaming. In places where the seams meet one side often juts out by at least 1/4 inch. That's hard to camouflage.
Also. We were told that while the contractor would install the trim work, they wouldn't paint it, we had to. So before the trim work went in we painted it so that when it was installed it would just need a few touch ups. Okay, that's not unreasonable. Except that they over ordered by 60 linear feet of trim work. I honestly can't remember what that cost, but of course it was painted already so it was nonrefundable.
So, besides the extra wood - two unopened boxes and a few other things, we also found a bag of the leveler that was unmentioned by Yuri in our garage.
Had we not found it we would've ended up paying not only for the unused leveling compound, but also for $60 labor. As it is, LL refunded the unused materials, sans the painted baseboard molding.
The installation process was ridiculous. If you need the flooring to be installed PLEASE hire your own contractor. I warn you, do not go through LL for installation. You'll regret it.
BTW - Yuri was finally finished at about 7pm that night. read more