Having recently coming home to a flooded basement, I was in a panic mode to find someone to come out and get my place dried and cleaned before the mold set in. After flipping thru the yellow pages, I came across Ram Cleaning Services. Their ad stated that they specialized in disaster recovery and that they were IICRC certified, had lots of years of experience, etc. To me that seemed like a good choice.
After working with them for a few days, I started to have second thoughts as to whether these guys were the best guys for the job or not. When talking to the main person, he stated that the cleanup job would cost between $10,000 and $16,000 at the most. I was shocked the next day to get an estimate for almost $17,000. And this estimate was not broken down in a way to justify the high costs. I thought this was very high considering that all they were doing is ripping out the carpets and walls from my basement, some flooring from the main floor and some of the walls. This price did not include any kind of restoration that would see my home back to the condition that it was in before the flood occurred. On the other hand, maybe it is just me and I am out of touch as to how much it actually costs to handle a flooded basement restoration project.
I also did some research and discovered that they are not registered with the BBB and have had several complaints over the past couple of years. As well, I went to the IICRC website and discovered that they were not listed on the certified companies list.
At this point, it was too late to switch companies and I just crossed my fingers and hoped that they would prove the others wrong and get the job done properly.
The other thing that concerned me is that it took about 4 weeks to get the house completely dried and they had all their equipment out of my home. I am not sure if this is caused from not using enough driers/fans or not using the proper equipment. My estimate mentioned the use of 6 dehumidifiers, but at the most I only counted about 4. I was not there every day so I could not confirm if the other 2 were added after I left. As well, when I was there, there were several times that the units were turned off because they had tripped a circuit.
After they had completed everything, I was shocked to see that I was also charged $700 for their initial assessment that was billed directly to my credit card. I would have thought this would have been included in the final bill that was given in the estimate. So my job that was supposed to cost no more than $16,000 ended up costing close to $18,000 (after taxes).
The end result is that they did get my house dried out and had all my damaged valuables, carpets, walls, etc removed and disposed of. Will I use these guys for my next flooded basement? Hard to say, but one thing for sure is that I will not be in such a panic mode and will get a couple of estimates before hiring a company to do the work. read more