Beware of the Flooring Department.
I hired The Flooring Department to install tile and granite countertops in my home. What a disaster! Leo, the owner talks a good game. I was convinced I was hiring a top notch company. Boy was I wrong. To make the installation easier on the installers, I made arrangements to move out of my house for the week it was supposed to take to complete the work. I was not able to move back in for something like four weeks. The tile is installed so unevenly I don't want to walk on it in bare feet. The grout lines were supposed to be 1/8 inch wide. Some are, some start out 1/8 inch and end much wider on the same tile. The grout line gap varies all over the place throughout my entire house. It is awful. The installers were supposed to use spacers to make sure the tile gap was even, consistent and 1/8 inch, but instead they just eyeballed it and not very well. I pointed this out to Leo in the master bedroom, before they began laying tile in the rest of the house. He assured me he would take care of it, he did nothing. If anything the rest of the house is worse than the master.
The granite countertops are a disaster as well. The fabricator they use is a joke. He cut one of the bathroom countertops 2 inches too short and had to make a new one. He also cut the hole in the piece of granite for the kitchen sink too big for the under counter sink, which he had measured before fabricating the countertop. Then he tried to tell us it was our fault because we did not tell him we did not want a big ridge around the sink. Unable to "fix" this screw up, we had to locate a new, larger sink to fit the hole. I will say, Leo did cover the cost of the replacement sink. Of course that was way less costly than having to replace the entire piece of granite. The cut edges of the stones were so badly chipped, he had to use filler to try and cover up his poor workmanship. Unfortunately, he did not make any attempt to color match the filler with the granite, so many of these repairs are quite easy to see. The seam between the two pieces of granite on the island is so poorly matched and blended you can see the seam from across the entire house. It looks so bad it completely overshadows the beauty of the granite. The fabricator broke the countertop for the master bathroom, glued it back together, then denied it was broken. Unfortunately, you can easily see the repair seam. This piece of granite should never have been installed after it had been broken by the installer.
Apparently the particular granite picked out for my house is prone to small pits which can be hard to see because the granite is quite dark. Something Leo failed to tell us when he suggested this granite. Perhaps he was not aware of this issue, I do not know. Once the granite was installed, we found several of these pits and notified Leo. He had the fabricator come out and fill them in during the final walkthrough.
When Leo arrived to do the final walkthrough, he commented on how awesome the house looked. I told him I thought it looked like crap and began pointing out the vast number of workmanship issues. I brought up the pitting issue of the granite and told him I was concerned that we would find more, later and asked if he could have the granite fabricator teach me how to perform the repair work so I would not have to call him if we found more. Leo assured me that he stands behind his company's work and he would send someone out if we found more pits. We did find more pits just a few days later. We contacted Leo to let him know we found more, but told him to hold off sending anyone for a few more days so we could try to make sure we found them all. We attempted to contact Leo a couple days later to make arrangements to get the pits repaired, but he began to ignore our calls and text messages. I finally got ahold of Tonya, Leo's wife and partner. She assured me she would speak with Leo right away and get this issue resolved. We have never heard from them since. Going on 4 months now. I tried to dispute a small portion of the final payment so I could hire someone else to make the repairs, but Leo and Tonya lied to their bank and claimed they had made all of the repairs.
Oh I forgot to mention, the installers scratched the front of our stainless steel refrigerator, dented the side of my new gas range, splattered thin set over the front of an expensive picture hanging on the wall, broke a wall clock, covered up chipped tiles with grout so they would not have to replace them and left the house a complete mess when they left.
This is by far the most expensive, worse mistake I have ever made. I hope you do not make the same mistake. read more
