I would absolutely not recommend hiring Soco Window & Door.
If you decide to take the risk and hire them, I would highly encourage you to go into it very cautiously. If anything goes wrong, do not expect them to take it seriously and do not expect them to go the extra mile to make things right. The ownership does not take responsibility and will haggle you to get out of paying for their mistakes.
You can be assured that Soco Window & Door will do whatever it can to take your money while expecting you to be content with their horrible quality of work.
The Details:
I recently hired Soco Window & Door to replace the three external doors on my house. The installation of the doors was decent. The painting of the doors, on the other hand, concluded as the worst experience I have had in the ownership of my house.
During installation, we noticed that the quality of the painting was extremely poor. The paint was light and in some places non existent (there are many places where no paint was applied to the door). The brush strokes are random and not consistent (imagine a two year old coloring book and you will get the idea). There are numerous dings, smudges, and marks in the paint itself. There are many places where the paint was mistakenly applied to the black rubber seals around the door. It's almost as if the person who painted the doors had never painted before.
Then the person said, out loud: "I've never painted before." Our mouths puckered with frustration. He then followed up with: "I hate this. I'm never painting again." We could not believe what we were hearing.
We immediately told the foreman that the painting was not going well. The owner, who visited the job site, said out loud: "These doors will need to be repainted." Whew, crisis averted! Nope. The worst was yet to come.
The doors were never repainted. The owner never followed up to check the quality he saw was bad. The salesperson called to ask how installation went, and I verbalized my disappointment, again, in the painting. He said he would check with the owner. He never called back.
A week later I got a bill from the salesperson asking to close the account. I replied and asked about the poor paint job and again, no response. I escalated to the owner as I knew he saw first hand how bad the paint was. He refused to take responsibility.
For the next week the owner and I haggled over how to fix the bad paint. He wanted to have his team come back out and repaint the doors. This could have been an option I was open to except I didn't really want the person who had never painted before trying his luck again. I declined and asked for $300, or half off the price I paid to have the doors painted. The owner then told me it only cost him $300 total to paint the doors, although he quoted me $600. The owner refused the discount of half off the quoted price, his only reason being that he could not afford it.
The salesperson then informed me that before anything else proceeded, he needed to inspect the quality doors. I was relieved by this as I knew that upon seeing how bad the doors were painted, Soco Window & Door would finally come around.
The salesperson showed up and I took him around and showed him each door inside and out, and even had a document where I documented on a diagram of the doors each mark, paint brush stroke, ding, dent, smudge, and splatter. The salesperson took only two pictures with his cell phone, and they were only of one side of one door. I was flabbergasted as to his indifference to how bad the paint was.
The owner contacted me a few days later, only gave me a $40 discount (6% off the quoted price of $600), and asked me to pay the bill immediately.
I knew I would not win and the haggling nightmare would continue ... so I paid them. My doors are horrible and I finally gave in and paid the money they demanded from me. And to make it worse, I will have to pay even more money to have a company I trust repaint the doors.
I guess the customer is not always right. I will never work with them again. read more
