1 Mikes Flooring

Please do not deal with this company and save yourself the grief we did. They will take your money but they will not stand behind their work. Our floors were put in crooked and the corners were terribly done. We had a contractor come send see their work and they said it was one of the worst they had seen. Once Mike got his money he would not answer his cell and refused to rectify the situation.

My husband and I were looking for a place who could do carpeting to our home that we jus recently bought. After shopping around, we decided to stop by Mikes Carpet & Flooring as we heard they have great service and sales. We browsed through flooring options for our new house. Kelly was very knowledgeable and provided outstanding customer service. She answered all of our questions and showed us many samples while explaining the pros and cons of each. We decided to do laminate in the living room, dining room, entrance and hallway as it is scratch resistant (we have pets so we knew they would scratch the floor) The laminate we chose looks like hardwood and beautiful Brazilian Cherry. We put half Berber and plush carpet in the bedrooms and stairs. Originally I wanted Berber but Berber is not soft so I was pleased to see that they have half and half this way the carpet is still soft and durable. It is the Hilton Head carpet. It had great warranty and was stain proof which also was a bonus for as in case one of our pets had an accident. I had new baseboard put in. I chose to have them stay primed white and not painted. The transition pieces were real wood and stained to match my floor.
The installation went smoothly. It started out by them ripping up the old floor on the main floor and installing the laminate. They finished the laminate installation in one day. The following day we had the carpet put it and it was also finished in one day. The installers were polite and work hard to finish the floors in a professional manner. I had done a lot of comparison shopping prior to Mikes Flooring, Mikes Flooring had high Quality, best Price and most of all trustworthy!

Mikes Carpet & Flooring is the best flooring company - I had a wonderful experience with them. I decided to go with Mikes Carpet & Flooring because number one they were specific with what they do. Everything is in writing and very clear so there were no surprises. Number two they had a good deal on laminate flooring and number three - when Mike did the in home estimate he took his time, was knowledgeable so I feel very comfortable. Laminate flooring installation took one day. Looks awesome!.

I live in the states and I have a apartment in Vancouver. My tenants had moved out and left a big mess. The carpet looked horrible and needed to be changed. I contacted Mikes Carpet & Flooring. Spoke to Mike and explained my situation to him. He was very easy to deal with, He measured the place and sent me the measurements. I chose carpet from the website. I had a large selection to choose from. Within a week the carpet was changed and I was able to have the new tenants move in. Mikes Carpet & Flooring were great. Saved a lot of money, time and stress by hiring them.

Short version: We had laminate installed on May 27th, and are still fighting with this company to date.

Mike's flooring didn't do a proper pre-install check of our premises, even when invited to do so by us (the customers). We had holes in our carpet, and when they came to do the estimate, we invited them to take a look at the carpet -- and they declined.

They arrived on May 27th to do the install. I stayed out of the installers way in another room while they worked. At no point did anyone ever come to me and discuss any problems with me. By the time they came and got me, the floor was already down.

What really happened though? They ripped and cut up all our carpet without a single check or a single thought, and only THEN realized the sub-floor was terribly uneven. Instead of informing us the sub-floor was uneven and asking us what we wanted to do, they secretly called Mike from Mike's Floors and told him (not us), and he advised them to install the floors anyway.. so they installed the laminate on the sub-floor anyway without our informed consent.

We now have floors that are bouncing and buckling and will most likely eventually break at the joints (the installers themselves even said it would happen). Mike's Flooring keeps skirting responsibility for this problem despite repeated attempts to work out a resolution with them.

Mike's Flooring keeps saying we signed a contract stating they are not responsible for leveling but we are not holding this company responsible for leveling. Just the opposite, in fact. We are holding them responsible for having installed the proper product based on the state of the sub-floor, in addition to getting the customer's consent. We are holding them responsible for weak tactics and faulty business practices since they failed to do so. Had they properly inspected the floors, we would never have installed laminate to begin with, we would have left carpet in our unit or had Mike's Floor install Carpet, not laminate.

Once they found out we were upset, they tried to pacify us by saying they would take up the floor and we could "pay $5,000 to level the floor". So essentially, they did the job and then held us hostage after-the-fact if we wanted the job done "right".

In addition, we found out there there are additional ways to deal with uneven subfloor if that is your only choice when installing laminate, including shimming the floor so the laminate at least doesn't bounce and finally break. This is something we learned after by consulting with additional professionals.

Everyone we've spoken to has stated that Mike's Flooring has moved forward in bad faith, bad business practice, and bad contracting. We are unsatisfied customers who feel cheated and neglected. We are looking for a written guarantee that they stand behind the installation they did without our informed consent, to which they have been consistently resisting.

We are in the process of a Better Business Bureau complaint against this company.


-------------------------------------------
Long version:
-------------------------------------------
We had new laminate flooring installed on May 27th, 2013.

Installers came to our unit in the morning, and due to the size of the apartment, I was confined to a small bedroom with our dogs to make sure they didn't cause any trouble, as well as all of our furniture was in the two bedrooms (carpet stayed in the bedrooms).

We stayed out of the installers’ way the entire time and were only brought out to view the process of the flooring at the stage where about 95% of the flooring was already down. It looked OK at first glance but was covered in dirt and debris, so I returned to the bedroom to wait out the process with our dogs.

At the end when all the flooring was down, we were told they could not install one of the transitions (into the bathroom) because the door would not close with it in. I was incredibly frustrated and confused, as no one had told us prior that there could be issues with our doors.

Mike (of Mike's Flooring) had done our estimate. He did not check door clearance issues; he did not examine the floor beneath the carpet either. Nothing was done other than wall-to-wall measurements. During the estimate process, I told Mike that he may examine the flooring beneath the carpet as there were several holes and torn up pieces (damaged by our dogs) for him to take a look. He declined, in the presence of my husband who also recalls him declining to examine the flooring underneath the carpet.

We found this strange, as I would assume he would have wanted to see what was underneath, but we took them to be the professionals and not us, so we went along with his plans. We also asked them by email after the estimate was complete if the carpet removal costs that we paid for were going to cover the removal of the linoleum in the kitchen as well, to which we were told they didn't have to remove the linoleum. Again, they're the professionals not me, so we left it at that.

Moving forward, the fact that the door would not clear the transition was very frustrating for me in that moment as we had absolutely no way of fixing it, and there was a strip of the bathroom floor gone in the meantime where the transition should be. We were left to figure out a way to ourselves to shorten the door, with little advice from the contracted installers about the door itself (one of whom seemed to speak little to no English, the other spoke difficult-to-understand English). The installers literally left us with a piece of transition, some glue in a canister we can't even use without buying the proper tool to get the glue out, and the advice on how to glue it down in the doorway.

We were essentially expected to 'do it ourselves', on a job we paid $2,800 for. Which is not something we would have chosen to do ourselves, if we had have been informed prior that one of the doors would have clearance issues, we would have either had someone picked out to do the job, chosen not to do the job at all, or deferred installation until we could figure out a plan of action. We are not carpenters.

In addition, the other two transitions had to be 'set' with glue -- something we were not informed of prior, we had no idea -- When the installers were done gluing them down in the doorway, he asked us for heavy objects from our house to hold them down! We found this to be very unprofessional to have to uproot items of a heavy nature without a single drop of advanced notice. We found boxes to put atop them which weren't all that heavy unfortunately and the installer seemed displeased with the weight of them as if it weren't enough -- but he still allowed them to be the items that held the transitions down.

We were never once told prior to this that we would have to come up with heavy objects to set on top of transitions to keep them 'held down' until they set. Not once during the estimate or installation phase, only at the end when all was said and done.

So we covered the transition area with boxes that we could find.

Moving on to the body of the complaint:

After the incident with the transition, both installers went down to their vehicle. I was very frustrated at how things were going, so I took a walk around the apartment at that point in time. As I walked around the unit, the floors in three to four places in the unit bent and bounced under my feet, in at least one location the drop is considerable. I remember phoning my husband and saying "It's like a fun house in here the floors are so uneven."

When the installers came back up, I explained the problem to which one of them said "Well the floors were uneven underneath." The floor/sub-floor was uneven? The same floors that the estimator (Mike of Mike's Carpet) refused to take a look at? No one ever brought out a level or ever checked underneath the floors, nothing. Not one thing.

In addition, one of the major caveats in the floor is coming out of the kitchen into the living area. As far as I know, they put the laminate directly over the linoleum in the kitchen without removing it, meaning the kitchen is officially higher than the living area in height! So when you laminate over the kitchen, of course it will drop down into the main living area a bit. It only dawned on me now how stupid it was to leave the linoleum in the kitchen in place.

At no point did the installers come and tell me "Your floors are terribly uneven. How would you like to proceed?"

If they had, my answer would have been "Put our carpet back." But of course they had already ripped and cut the entire thing away by this point, rather than lifting some of the carpet in the living area in order to check the floors, instead they got right down to business cutting our carpet in the hallways. I know from my own research and from my husband doing his research that the number one mistake people make is to install laminate flooring on an uneven surface. Even the most basic of contractors knows this. Even we know this and had we known that the floors were uneven, we would not have leveled the floor, we would have just chosen not to install laminate.

I tried to get more information out of the installers about how on earth this was supposed to be a proper installation, but I was only met with disillusion. "We're just paid to put it down". "Just sign the paper so I can get paid". And still when I showed him one of the spots where it was bouncing, and I pressed my foot up and down on it to demonstrate and asked him "And you're sure this won't break?", the installer said to me (verbatim): "Well if you keep doing that, of course it will break."

So just to clarify, the installers themselves said the bouncing points in the floor will break.

We phoned Mike of Mike's Flooring that day looking for an explanation. While on the phone with him later in the evening, we were told that the floor will 'settle' with the uneven floors (so what he's telling me is that my floor is going to have a dip in it? Yes, that's so much better, clearly!).. even though all of our research says the floors -could- have been at least shimmed with either padding or wood to prevent the dips in the floors, he was telling me it was perfectly OK.

He said the installers had actually telephoned him during the install to tell him the floors were uneven! And he told them to go ahead and install them anyway, without talking to us. At no point did anyone tell us the floors were uneven or explain what that would mean for us going into the future.

He said he was trying to save us money, to save people money, because who would pay $5,000 to level the floor -- not most people, was his opinion. But the problem is that no one asked us, no one informed us, and the fact is there was another option rather than pay $5,000 for a leveled floor.

The option would have been for him to have checked the floors prior to installation, and in the event the floors were found to be grossly uneven as they are, we would have chosen not to install the laminate. Instead, we would have replaced the damaged carpet. In fact we may have lived with the damaged carpet for some time to come if the alternative was poorly-installed floors.

But now the floors were here, essentially without our informed consent. So I pushed him over and over again to assure us that these floors would be covered by the warranty and by Mike's Flooring in the event of damage to the bouncing areas. He was somewhat reluctant to state it firmly but in the end upon my questioning him that we could rely on them to be responsible for the floors, he said that yes, they stand by their installation.

We took that as gospel, some shred of hope at least. He also apologized on the phone for not having told us the need for heavy objects on the doorway transitions earlier, and he asked us to please not move the boxes until the next day. And that was it for the night.

The next day we removed the boxes from the transitions so we could move our furniture. Luckily this was the first thing going right for us, the transitions seemed firmly in place and they were not moving like they were the day before. However when we removed the boxes and turned on all the lights in the area to check the work, we noticed there was a notch gouged out of the floor, and not by anything we had placed there to hold the floor down that's for sure.

The gouge in the floor is crescent-shaped and resembles a tool mark, maybe a hammer or some other tool, I'm not sure. But it's there.

I emailed Mike's Flooring immediately that evening (evening of the 28th) with a photo of the damage attached.

I am still waiting on the morning of the 31st to have anyone even attempt to contact me, despite the company being very prompt at responding prior, scheduling our estimate/installation, and certainly in taking our money. But for this, we get put off.

In addition (as if there weren't enough already), if you recall my talking about the bathroom transition that couldn't be installed. Well when I asked the installers to show me how far the door would close with the transition in, they put the transition down in place and pulled the door closed, but instead of stopping when the transition resisted the door, he forced the door over the transition, causing a huge scratch in the finish of the transition.

So that's additional damage on top of everything else.

We've been through a lot with these floors in a matter of days. We're tired, we're stressed, we're anxious about our product. We live in a housing co-op that requires us to do things by-the-book and ensure quality workmanship on anything we change out. We do not 'own' this property, we are accountable to someone else, and Mike's Flooring needs to be accountable to -us- in turn.

These floors are improperly installed and we were improperly informed during the entire process. As a result, we have a sub-par installation of the product we chose, and we chose the product based on a lack of information by the company. Essentially we were kept in ignorance, perhaps on purpose though I can only speculate as to the intent.

And finally: Though it was mentioned that the crew would clean up after themselves, the unit was left caked in dirt both inside and out on our balcony. It took many hours to clean it all up, and the balcony is still filthy.

What we’d like at this point is as follows:

1) The chip in the floor repaired

2) The damage to the bathroom transition touched up in some way (we have no choice but to install the transition ourselves somehow this weekend because otherwise we risk damaging the floors near the bathroom door over time)

3) A guarantee in writing and signed by Mike of Mike’s Carpet and Flooring that states Mike’s Carpet and Flooring shall be responsible for any and all damage to these floors in any of the uneven areas, including but not limited to cracking of the locking joints or any other portion of the floorboards. There are three to four areas and Mike’s Carpet and Flooring is more than welcome to come and document these areas for future reference, otherwise we will document them ourselves.

Barring the above solution, we would ask that:

A significant portion of our money is refunded on this job so that we can potentially hire someone to assess and potentially fix the floors that Mike's Flooring installed.

We are open to other potential solutions as well and are not unreasonable people. But we are frustrated, angry, and very very unsatisfied.


-------------
Update June 19, 2013

Mike's Flooring sent us a repair tech to install the transition in our door (and we agreed we would chop the door ourselves, even though we have no clue what we're doing) and "fix" the chip in our floor.

Here are the results:

The chip in the floor was filled with paste. A brand-new installation, damaged by them, and instead of replacing the board, they filled it with paste. Paste I can get at Home Depot for $5 which is exactly what the installer told me husband he could actually do. Cheap fix for cheap work, I guess. Go figure.

The transition in the bathroom: The installer showed up with two different types of transitions.. and the lower-profile type? Well that fit in the door perfectly, WITHOUT having to chop the door AT ALL.

Had Mike's Flooring taken only a moment to inspect our premesis when they first did the estimate, they would have known these things prior and they would have shown up properly prepared like a professional should.


Even though Mike's Flooring repaired the chip (barely) in our floor, if you can call it 'repaired', and installed the transition in our bathroom as they should have done to begin with.. we are still completely unsatisfied, and we still do NOT have a written agreement from the company to warranty the floors in the uneven areas. We have a lot of phone-call promises that we practically had to berate out of them by repeating the question over and over and over again, but nothign in writing which is what I wanted.

I still feel I will end up filling a Better Business Bureau complaint against them in an attempt to get the warranty -in writing- for having installed laminate on uneven floors without informing the customer (us).


So there you have it. Buyer beware.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duGXihIaZwY

For me dealing with Mikes Carpet & Flooring was a very good experience. They had a good price. The installers were professional and did a beautiful work.

I've heard about Mike from a neighbor. He was super happy with his new floors and kind of forced me to work with Mike. Well, I don't regret it. I thank both, my neighbor Toni and Mike. To Toni for putting so much pressure on me to work with Mike, and to Mike for not disappointing me. One day, one great job, one low price. Great customer service, great installation, great price. $1.99 / square foot, including installation. Nobody can beat that.