Need advice: what do I do if carpet installer did careless work, didn't complete job?
What can a customer do when an installer's work is careless and a job remains incomplete for two months?
I decided to have new carpet installed in 3 bedrooms, a hallway, and stairs. The installer came yesterday and nothing went according to plan.
We were told: "it'll take a couple of hours because the installer cuts the carpet at their workshop and only does final cuts in the house." Instead they unrolled 35 feet of carpet right the middle of a city street, in the leaves, grit, dirt, grease, and who knows what else. They blocked traffic and a neighbor called the cops. I saw cars trying squeeze by possibly running over the edge. Just what you want to see when you just spent almost $10K on cream colored wool carpet.
The work is careless and incomplete:
- The stairs are not carpeted
- The carpet is crooked in a 35 foot hallway. It's skewed by about 5 degrees causing the pattern to run diagonally the whole way
- There are dirt and leaves on the new carpet as well as in the house
- The spindles look like a student project: the pattern on one side of the spindle is not aligned with the other side
At 7:30 PM I asked if they were planning to leave soon and return the next day to finish. They said: "They didn't give us the right amount of carpet. It was short. Someone didn't measure right." We saw the cut plan, and we knew that it all rooms and stair steps had been planned for.
When I talked to the installation manager, she told me a different story: "The cut plan did not have the pattern oriented properly in one bedroom, so we corrected that. But that meant there was not enough carpet to carpet the stairs."
No one spoke to us about this.
Now we face a possible 2 month wait to have more carpet shipped, and then another week to have it installed. Meanwhile, the whole point of this renovation was to get the house ready for family traveling from out of state for a celebration this weekend.
What should I do? I paid 100% up-front (won't do that again). Should I initiate a charge-back on my credit card because the company didn't fulfill the contract we signed? And then once they fix the skewed pattern, the spindles, and install the stairs, drop the charge-back? I'm worried that they'll just stall and then "forget to finish" because they got paid.