*Buyer Beware, please read*
**This review is specifically for Lowes Project Services, not for the retail store. This is my experience purchasing a fence through Lowes**
In a nutshell I paid $10,000 + for a fence from Lowes in May and its now August and I still dont have a fence and Lowes has never once returned a call from me regarding this project despite calling them countless times.
It took an experience so incredibly bad like this with Lowes to bring me out of my multi-year Yelp Hiatus just because I want everyone to know how terrible this experience was.
I chose Lowes to complete a fence mostly because I figured bigger company, more resources to get things done, decent reputation, but I was way off.
The guy came out to survey my yard and see what I wanted and it was all good. Even talked me into a Lowes Credit card to put the whole project on. This was fine by me because it gave me something like 7% off the entire project and I planned to pay the whole thing off with my first payment anyway, going smoothly so far, they said we can get started in the next 2-3 weeks and weeks and I was excited.
The deal with Lowes is once they have your money they could care less about your project. Weeks went by with me calling in all the time just to get a status update. Every time it was either an excuse like "Well it has been rainy so projects are probably delayed" to well they are probably waiting on approval", etc. They would blame the contractor doing the actual work at every step of the way (Lowes does not do the actual work btw, they sub contract it out).
After maybe 6 weeks went by, it turns out they never handed my yard blueprints in to get the permit approved. Lowes and the contractor are supposed handle this and the guy comes back to me weeks later and says the yard survey (which he took a picture of on his phone) are not high quality enough to pass for the permit. It seems like we could have figured this out 6 weeks or 2 months ago if you actually handed them in then but no, you forgot. So now, the guy comes back out to my house, takes my actual plans (which I doubt I'll ever get back) and agrees to take them to the contractor or to the borough.
Several more weeks go by, at this point I'm calling Lowes AND the contractor every couple of days trying to get some kind of answers or any update as to where my project stands, have my plans been turned in to the borough, etc. Lowes says they turned them in and the contractor says they dont have them. The contractor finally lets me know they received the plans yesterday (2 weeks after Lowes supposedly dropped them off again) and that they are taking them to the borough for approval.
The whole thing was just incredibly frustrating, Lowes pointing the finger at the contractor and Vice Verse, openly just lying about delivering my plans. Worst of all is all the lunches I spent instead of eating, calling Lowes just for any kind of update. Every time I would call whoever I speak to at Lowes would promise to check and call me back and every single time they would never call back. it got to the point where maybe after the 15th time of this no call back my conversation with a woman in customer service got so heated that a man jumped on the line out of nowhere (he must have been listening in) identified himself as a supervisor and assured me he knows how frustrating it can be when ppl dont call back and that he would call the contractor himself right now and call me back in 15 minutes. Of course, weeks later no call back.
Remember I said I put the whole project on a Lowes Credit Card they talked me into signing up for and just planned to pay off the entire balance right away. When your project is 2 months in and you have no fence, no idea on a timeline on when the project might start and the company wont even return your calls, you get kind of hesitant to pay off the whole thing because who knows whats going to happen with this project? So I paid the minimum balance one time and got to pay a nice little $250 interest charge on my 2nd bill... Much more than the minimum payment..
One other highlight is one time I was so frustrated and a woman I was talking to said "you can just get a refund if you would like?" I said fabulous, why didnt you tell me this earlier? She says "yeah, you just wont get all your money back because these are custom parts"... Whats the point of a refund if you dont get your money back? And custom parts? These are standard pieces of fencing with the exception of 1 custom piece that needs to go over some tree roots....
Just all around terrible, literally one of the worst experiences of my life. Still out $10 grand and no fence to speak of... pretty sure they never once returned a call to me, one of the worst decisions I have ever made to trust these guys.
And to think, I even told the sales guy if this goes well I was going to have them do my deck project too! Beware!!! I plan on posting this everywhere I can. read more