Perkins Flooring and Design

Updating my review to 1 star (down from 2).
I received an extremely lame email from Chris Perkins today. He tells me they were just too busy for my project. 1) Why bid it then? 2) It’s been four months! Why couldn’t you respond with that information ages ago? 3) I was completely flexible in my timing and I expressed that during the bid. You had absolutely no excuse to just stop responding without explanation.
No Chris, I will not «consider the removal of the review.» As stated in my reply today, your lack of communication was irresponsible, disrespectful & completely inexcusable. I was prepared to hire you, but I have long since had the work done by someone else. If you don’t want terrible reviews, don’t provide terrible service; otherwise, accept the consequences of your actions (or inaction in this case) like an adult.
Pathetic.

I wish I would have read the reviews first, and I would never had used this company. I was refered to them by a friend. The owner, Chris Perkins, forgot to show up for our first meeting and convinced me to give him another chance; that was my fault and I never should have. The owner is charming in order to get the job but he lacks accountability and came for the payments but thats about it. I was told it would take two days and it took four and I still had to clean up after them. I waited for the crew to show up both days for 2 hours-​no call to tell me they were running late. The crew was dumped here with little direction, no wonder they used the wrong grout color. They were hard workers but didnt have the materials they needed. When i tried to have them return to fix the mistakes (I withheld a portion of the payment) the owner tried to blame me for not being available? Really? blame the customer? I had to spend hours cleaning up the stains and grout and repairing the chipped paint and the dust throughout the house. The floor finaly looks good, thanks to me.

I bought my flooring from a popular online flooring website. The flooring was admittedly cheap and I ordered 422 sqft more than I needed to make sure I had enough to sort though and pick out what I wanted and what I did not want installed. I needed 790 sqft installed and ordered 1,212 sqft. The owner knew and saw what he would be installing when he gave me the quote. In the end the piles I wanted installed totaled 834 sqft, more than enough to finish the project.
I spent hours over days sorting the boards (twice over) I wanted installed into piles, labeled with sticky notes and putting everything I did not want installed into a waste pile. I gave the owner and installation crew leader clear instructions the morning of the installation to please only use the good piles I had labeled for install and not to use the waste pile because those pieces had both structural defects and major aesthetic defects (obvious just by looking at the waste pile).
I came home at the end of day one where they had completed about half the installation and found the waste pile significantly lower and to my frustration the piles I had spent hours sorting were barely touched. I gave the situation the benefit of the doubt in that surely there was some good reason they had used the waste pile, even though there was absolutely no need to do so. At this point the floor was covered with blue tape and glue residue and even though the owner said we could walk on it, we wanted to do so as little as possible because the glue had not dried yet so we were not able to look at everything in great detail that night. Even though I was frustrated, I was still excited to see the carpet gone and wood on the floor and didn’t fully realize how bad things were. I made the owner aware that night about the piles and he said he would look into it the next morning and make everything right.
On the second day I came home and checked the progress the following evening when they had finished laying all the flooring. For reasons I will never understand they continued to use the waste pile the second day after I had warned the owner the night before. They used approximately 250 sqft of wood from the waste pile throughout my floor installation. I now have approximately 250 sqft of wood I WANTED installed sitting in my garage. I now have pieces installed that are missing half their stain, have large black stains running down them, have cracks and other really bad defects that I had weeded out into the waste pile. In addition, this was a glue down installation and I have portions of my floor where I can see the boards move up and down when I walk on them, either because they used boards from the waste pile that were severely bowed and should never have been installed or were just poorly installed. Again, this had all been weeded out into a waste pile and somebody who was paying the smallest amount of attention to the installation would not have installed these pieces just by looking at them. Additionally, the shoe molding is not flush with the floor at all in many areas and they did not caulk the bottom.
When I talked to the owner he admitted that he had neglected this project but said he regretted taking the project and that this was really all my fault since I provided the wood for them to install and things would have be different if I had bought the wood from them. The owner’s solution was they would come out and replace SOME of the bad boards. He indicated that in order to replace a bad board, they had to take up multiple boards surrounding the bad board which meant taking out some of the good ones in the process. Considering they installed 250 sqft of waste wood (or approximately 280 planks) they were not supposed to all over the floor I did not feel this was a liable solution as I had bad pieces spread out all over my floor. Not to mention the boards with structural defects which who knows what type of problems they will give me in the future. I did not think this major mistake could be patch fixed and SUGGESTED finding a financial solution to the problem as I would have to truly redo the entire floor to actually fix the problem they had created and I obviously did not have enough wood left over to do a complete redo. The owner did not want to work with me and replied back that I had rejected their patch work solution and to pay the balance by the end up the week or they would file a lien against my property and charge me with theft of service. At this point I decided to settle for their offered patch work solution and at least get the really visible bad planks taken care of and move on from the situation but they were unwilling to honor that solution any longer. I decided I had too many things going on in my life to add this to the frustration list and decided to just pay them and move on from the situation. To summarize my experience, I don’t believe the installation could have gone any worse nor that I could have been treated any worse as a customer.

Initial experience and customer engagement is rock solid for landing the deal. However, when I needed some follow up corrective work the customer service is not even close to the mark! Several communications (written and verbal) without following through on commitments to complete the job properly! He hires the local labor pool who doesn’t follow instructions and ends up taking on too many projects to get a decent review. DO NOT HIRE… BUY BE WARE THIS COMPANY IS A JOKE.

I fell into a scam with this company which has already cost me over $ 2000, so I would like to pass on a warning to consumers. This business is in my neighborhood, although I found them through the Home Advisor Network (
). We were looking to install new flooring in a small room, and I had decided on a wood floor. When I first contacted Chris Perkins he seemed amicable and appeared to offer reasonable prices. I stipulated that I wanted a single company to be responsible for installing a subfloor and the wood floor so that there wouldn’t be any finger pointing if things weren’t working out. The complication was that the subfloor would be installed over a concrete garage floor with a slope and the final wood floor had to meet an existing concrete ledge exactly to avoid a tripping hazard. The first time he came out he introduced me to one contractor who seemed competent, by the second time he came out he had had a falling out with contractor #1 and was now working with EVCO Remodeling with whom he was sharing his office (I will be reviewing EVCO separately). Chris and the EVCO guy, Roger, came out and I explained again that I wanted a real wood floor and that the final floor had to meet the concrete ledge exactly. They agreed to these terms and left, stating they would send an estimate. I got an estimate, and the price seemed quite high, but I wasn’t sure how complicated it would be to get the subfloor just right and went with it. A couple of days passed, and they urged me to hurry up and make a down payment, as it would take over 3 weeks to get the wooden flooring material. (It turns out that this was a lie. The flooring material they planned to stick me with is readily available on the Internet for a couple of dollars a sq. foot and second day delivery — they apparently just needed the cash to float another project.) When I arrived at their shop to make a 50% down payment, they insisted I sign a contract. I thought nothing of this and signed (let’s just call this a learning experience). About a month later the subfloor was installed and ready for the flooring. When the so-​called «wood» floor arrived I discovered that it was a cheap manufactured wood product, readily available on the Internet (or at Home Depot even — different brand) for a couple of dollars a foot. I immediately contacted Chris Perkins and said there must have been some kind of mistake. He got angry, insisted that I had «changed my mind» and stated that I would have to pay for all boxes that had been opened in addition to paying a 25% restocking fee on for the unopened materials. I don’t see how there could have been a misunderstanding. We have a real wood floor upstairs which I showed him, and we even had a conversation about gluing vs. nailing the wood down. I also clearly specified that I didn’t want the wood to come prefinished, and the cheap stuff is pre-​finished. Nevertheles I agreed to pay for the used materials and the restocking fee. The rub was the subfloor had ostensibly been designed to accommodate the cheap 3/​8″ material rather than the real ¾″ wood floor that I thought I was getting. I suggested that we try and work something out that would be mutually satisfactory. The deal they came back with was that I pay them nearly the full price for the previous contract plus pay them the full amount again to fix their mistakes! Mistakes because the subfloor hadn’t been installed correctly. It didn’t line up with the concrete ledge with the cheap manufactured flooring material nor would it work with the real floor that I had specified. When I tried to explain this they just responded with «you signed a contract and must pay us the full amount that you owe us regardless of the quality of the job or whether or not we had actually finished it» (they hadn’t, of course). Now here’s the best part. When I contacted the Home Advisor Network to complain, they in turn contacted Chris Perkins and he told them that I had decided to go with a different company, so it had nothing to do with him. And in some sense I had, since I signed a contract with his partner and office mate, the EVCO guy at his insistence. This is how Chris Perkins keeps his Home Advisor reviews up. When they successfully scam someone and get a good review, he owns it. When he gets called out for being a weasel, liar, and crook he just tells the Home Advisor people that «the customer went with a different company» and so the review doesn’t apply to him. Draw your own conclusions about whether or not you want to do business with this company. I’m out at least $ 2000 which I probably won’t see again and must now start the entire project from scratch, since nothing the EVCO day laborers did when they came out is salvageable. And I also had to repair damaged drywall, the stained concrete floor they scratched up after I told them to be extra careful with it. and the mountains of trash they left lying around.