I like to operate with people who can be trusted to do good work on a handshake, and that's what I got with Andy his crew. The story is this:
I closed on a house in early May of 2013, and had about three weeks to get a lot of work done (electrical, painting, restoring or installing wood floors) before moving my family in. About a week into the work, my first floor guy (someone recommended by my realtor) got kind of sketchy when I called to confirm his work, and given my limited time I started looking for someone more dependable. Based on Luke's review, I gave Andy a call. He took the time to show up at the house on a Sunday (Mother's Day, no less) and made an estimate. Based on my needs, he said he and his crew could start later in the week. We accepted the estimate, and after getting the crew started I gave Andy the keys and let them get to work.
Although I had spent a few evenings tearing out layers of old carpet and vinyl flooring, the crew had to do a fair amount of this too. There was some pretty nasty carpet padding and ancient carpet I couldn't pry out myself, and TONS of nails everywhere on the upstairs floor. It probably took a lot of time to fill/fix the holes, and there were some places where old upstairs wood floor was missing and new flooring had to be feathered in. On the downstairs we installed new wood flooring entirely. It took about 5 days of what must have been pretty solid work, and the crew did a great job and really transformed the way the house looked. The final cost exceeded the initial estimate by about 15%, mainly because we eventually went with a wider plank on the downstairs and also had to add in the missing planks upstairs. Given the effort it seemed fair. Andy met my family and I on an evening for the final walk through, and gave us back the keys. We happily moved in as planned.
Something small but I really liked it: I left some small tools (carpet knife, a couple of pliers) in the house. I knew the guys might need the tools to pull out the old flooring, and I wasn't very worried if they "disappeared." At a certain point I did notice the tools were gone from where I left them. At the end of the job, when the crew was gone and I came back to see the finished floors, I found all the tools put back exactly where I left them. Really cool. read more