Hardwood Floors Refinished, A Cautionary Tale

We just had our floors in Park City sanded and finished.  This is very soon to be doing that in a house only five years old.  Our first lesson is:  "Oak is hard.  Hickory is hard. Mahogany, as pretty as it is, is not hard."  We have had hardwood floors in all our houses and condos, but it was always harder woods, which makes them a lot less susceptible to damage.

This leads us to our second lesson, which was already fairly well ingrained:  "Pets are hard on wood floors."   You know a 60 pounds dog trying to make a fast, sliding turn can dig in and makes some scratches.  Did you know a 12 pound cat can do the same thing?

An now for the third lesson, which I offer to anyone in the Park City or Salt Lake City area:  "If you are going to have your floors refinished, find someone other than Wood Floors Inc. to do them."  We got a recommendation to use them from a highly respected local builder.  In all fairness, we got a decent price and the floors now look beautiful.  So why not use them?  We had the floors finished while we were down in Moab for a little over a week.  When the floors were done, we asked our neighbor to go over and check on the house.  Seems that in their hurry to leave, the nice workers from Wood Floors Inc left our front door unlocked.  Not cool since we were gone another four days.

When we got home, here is what we found:

• Two half-consumed Coke cans sitting out
• Two half-eaten bags of snacks laying around
• Candy wrappers scattered 
• My 16' aluminum ladder was set up on our stairs (in the house, on the carpet)
• On the carpet below the ladder was a bunch of scrapings of some form, waiting to be ground into the rug.
• The wood HVAC vent covers were restained, but stuck to a piece of cardboard sitting in the entryway. I had to cut them all off the cardboard and then scrape the crap off the back of each one.
• My office windows were wide open, and it had rained a bit.
• Lights were on all over the house.  It was bad enough that a neighbor called while we were in Moab to make sure we were OK.
• One of our kitchen pullouts was sealed to the floor and I had to cut it loose.
• They used one of our kitchen towels as a dust rag and then folded it neatly so we wouldn't notice.
• They apparently did the job with our master bedroom door wide open, so instead of being dust free as promised, everything was coated, including things like bed spreads and blankets.
• They dumped all their sanding trash in our recycling bin.

When all was said and done, they were very apologetic, but at some point, who cares?  It cost us hours of extra cleaning and headaches.  For being so experienced, they sure did an incredibly unprofessional job.

I would never hire Wood Floors Inc of Salt Lake City again.