I had a broken water pipe in my attic which required wall and floor replacement. The contractor I used selected Riverchase to handle the flooring. DONT!
Initially things went very well, and I was impressed with the knowledge Doug James had and how he worked with the contractor and the insurance inspector to agree on the correct replacement, as we had two types of older wood and a patterned floor.
We had to replace the flooring in one room and resurface the flooring in the rest of the house to match. The replacement floor was a tricky pattern but was installed very well and I assumed that the rest of the job would be the same quality - WRONG! I should have suspected something when I had difficulty getting the brand of coating from Doug and then the workers showed up with a different brand. He obviously did not know how the work was being done.
The polyurethane was not applied evenly (see photo) and I was told it would require a 4th coat. This was a huge mistake as now this floor was much too glossy. Why I was not told is a mystery - the experienced installers must have known it would happen. Then they said all they could do was to start over, which they did but the floor is still too glossy, and the color does not match the rest of the house because they put on a second coat of stain. In retrospect, it is obvious that removing the first three coats does not actually get to fresh wood and so there is some residual stain and coating in the wood fiber. During this process, I tried repeatedly to get Doug out to supervise but he would not and said I was being "too picky" and that he "had to trust his workers." Wrong again - failure to supervise is a managerial error.
Additionally, they sawed a new floor vent wrong and did not advise me or replace it. When I asked them to repair it, they just some painter's putty in it and left it. This will not get hard and will collect dust. I finally got them to use a material that would harden. Not good, but better than having them remove it and mess it up. They also used a light-colored filler on dark wood (see photo). When I asked them about it, they said that there was no dark filler - an obvious lie, since I can buy it at the local Home Depot!
Initially they used a flat reciprocating sander, but when they redid the floor, they used a rotary sander and gouged the floor (see photo). There were areas with clear polyurethane applied unevenly and sanding marks remain (see photo).
All-in-all a lousy job of poor quality. It seems they just wanted to rush through and hope that i did not notice mistakes. A shame, since it would have been so easy to do it right. Now I have to look at their mistakes every day as there is nothing short of redoing the entire floor that would remedy.
Do not use this company for hardwood floors. read more