We had a car drive into the front of our house. What was worse than that experience, was having to deal with Service Master. The project was scheduled to wrap up in 7 months after the accident (already a long time), and we finally settled with them after 19 months (and this was after they proposed extending the project another 6 months). We never had a true project manager, and as homeowners were forced to project manage it ourselves, while trying to balance full time jobs. The level of unprofessionalism and incompetence we had to suffer through with Service Master brought us to tears.
We dealt with inexperienced employees/sub-contractors. There was no accountability because no one ever came by to review their work. The work was sub par as evidenced by the following:
* We were asked to leave our home for 2 weeks, so they could complete the majority of the disruptive work. We repeatedly asked for a schedule so we would know what was being done while we were gone, but never received one. When we came home after 2 weeks, barely anything had been done. Of the 14 days we were gone, they had only scheduled work for 2 of those days.
* This whole project was right at the beginning of Covid, and we had multiple ServiceMaster employees in and out of our home on a regular basis...and they were not wearing masks. I had to ask them no less than 3 times to please wear masks. On a particularly hot day we offered a ServiceMaster employee a soda, his response was "no thanks, I can't taste anything anyway". So they were still sending employees to our home that were known to have Covid.
* They installed the wrong size window in the front of the house where there was a matching window on the other side. We had to point this out to them. The response we got was "Can you live with it?"
* They had to repaint a bedroom due to cracks in the wall. It took them 4 attempts to patch up the cracks, use the right color, remove the paint they had gotten all over our floors and ceiling fan.
* They had to re-wrap load bearing beams in cedar because they destroyed the original ones. The first time they installed the cedar, one edge of the board wasn't flush with the ceiling...by 5 inches. They left it like this for a few weeks until they had time to return.
* They decided not to frame out the living room in the way it was originally. Response: We aren't really going off of drawings or plans but doing it from memory/photos.
* They poured a new concrete pathway...on a day it was raining pretty hard. This resulted in chipping and pitting almost immediately. Then they came back to "resurface" it, which again resulted in major cracking within weeks. They also poured our front stoop and it had a huge dip in it, so they then had to come back to pour another step on top of that. All in all, they attempted the concrete work 3 times and then determined it needed to be completely torn out and re-done. They also cracked the foundation using a Bobcat to recklessly remove the original stoop. Had to complain to get them to fix the cracked foundation.
* They determined that they didn't need to cap off the foundation or use flashing around the base of the stone work. In order to get this remediated the correct way, we needed to threaten to contact NARI. That was the only way they would complete the job up to code.
* They determined they didn't need to caulk around the trim work on the outside of the house, which we now need to pay for out of pocket.
When we received the final invoice, there were thousands of dollars worth of charges on it for line items that they never did, or instructed us as the homeowners to do. We had to go line by line and add up everything we were incorrectly charged for.
I have attached just a few photos of the dozens I have, showing what ServiceMaster considered completed work. They did not proactively catch any of these issues. Instead as the homeowners we had to report the issue, document it, and then deal with the subcontractors to point out what was wrong and tell them how to fix it.
In hindsight, I wish we had gone to NARI or gotten a lawyer involved. The headaches we went through with this company were absolutely not worth it. read more