Our floor contractor wouldn’t start until we had the A/C systems running for two weeks so that the moisture would work its way out of the pine floors. So after we waited for JEA to finally hook up our power and the A/C company to finish their third attempt at installing our two Trane units, we called the floor company to start their part of the job.

Adding urgency to the flooring situation was Agnes’ sister’s baby shower, which was scheduled to be at the Dellwood House on Sunday, January 27. Because we had worked everything out to give the floor company over a week to do the patches, sanding, staining, and coats of polyurethane, they committed to a finish date of Friday, January 25 “at the very latest”.

As it turns out “at the very latest” wasn’t quite as accurate as they had originally predicted.

The contractor got a later start than originally planned, Thursday instead of Wednesday the prior week, and worked at a less-than-speedy pace up until Tuesday (or so our neighbors reported). So on Tuesday the contractor called me in hopes of extending his deadline to Saturday, which would basically ruin our chances of staging the already incomplete house for the baby shower.

That wasn’t going to happen. I told him that he was just going to have to meet his deadline and speed up the pace a little bit.

Mistake #1: Apparently holding some people to a deadline means they will do the absolutely poorest and quickest job possible to hit that date.

The floor patches didn’t match the rest of the floor at all and the guy managed to get stain on most of the baseboards and doors.

It reminds me of the Michael Keaton movie Gung Ho.

Mistake #2: Color is important

In this case it meant the flooring guy forgot to do a “test board” to show us how the stain would look on our floor.

When we started the process we had to choose a stain and I remember the conversation vividly:

Me: “What’s the darkest stain you’ve got?”
Flooring company: “Ebony”
Me: “Great. We’ll go with that”
FC: “Are you sure? Because on pine it ca—”
Me: “We’ve seen it on pine. We like it that way. That’s what we want.”
FC: “Are you sure?”
Me: “Yes! [dammit!]”

Unfortunately when they ordered the stain they didn’t actually get the “Ebony” color I picked, which looks like this:

They instead ordered “Jacobean”, which looks like this:

Which on our floor looks like this:

The Result

Agnes was furious. I was upset but at the same time very happy I paid by AMEX — and told the company so.

So they did the entire house in the wrong color, got stain on the freshly-painted walls, doors, baseboards, and generally did a really awful job.

Now the same crew is over at the house sanding off the stain and redoing the entire job. I have a feeling that the owner’s regular checkups on the job will influence the quality of the re-do.

At least the baby shower went well…