Three Towers Flooring

thanks for the kind words. Your brother is a nice guy, we just finished installing his floor.

This customer bought the jatoba off the clearance section on the web page, that clearly states "NO WARRANTY, SOLD AS IS." He bought it for 50 cents per square foot, and we showed him half a box of the flooring before he purchased it. The pieces that we showed him had knots, and cracks, and we explained to him that that if that was the type of floor he was looking for, and he purchased a bit extra than he would be happy. He also mentioned it was a small space, and it would be covered by carpet and sofas, so it did not matter to him what it looked like. He also knew full well that anything he purchased on the odd lot and remnants section would be a final sale, as he phoned to say that he was coming from Barrie and he asked the definition of "rustic". Now, most people understand that rustic will have knots and some sort of manufacturing defects, and most people will have the common sense to know that when we say it is final sale, and there is no warranty, and we are openly telling you it is inferior quality, and hence that is the reason why we are selling it for 50 cents a square foot, that they are not getting a first rate product. The fact is, he was very happy when he was in the showroom, and we showed him all the pieces with defects. There are a lot of customers who want this type of flooring, but on our part we want to make sure that we are selling it to the people that want it, and not to people that are expecting something different. It would be very easy for us to say, "what do you expect for 50 cents per square foot?", but even then we went to the extent of showing him what he was getting, and putting the following disclaimer on his invoice, which is exactly what appears on the web page under our odd lots and remnants page:REMNANTS/ODD LOTS/OPEN BOXES
All Clearance items must be taken as stock lots. **UPDATED October 23rd, 2013. Subject to prior sale. Most of these items are over stock, or left overs from one-off production runs. Some of the clearance items boxes may be opened, or damaged. Stock must be taken "AS IS" and sold with NO WARRANTY on remnants/odd lots specials. Quantities may not be exact and need to be confirmed prior to sale. WE DO NOT ACCEPT RETURNS ON REMNANTS!

What appears to have happened, is that he purchased the floor without consulting his wife, and while he was installing it his wife did not like the knots. He came back to the showroom and his wife was complaining about the knots, and we showed him the web page advertisement and the invoice where her husband signed the disclaimer.

At this point, the customer got extremely agitated and got into his car and opened our warehouse loading door by himself, and started unloading the opened boxes of the hardwood and throwing them on the ground. We explained to him that he was not allowed to simply go into the warehouse on his own without any authorization, he started swearing and screaming and saying he wanted the material replaced with "good" material. We do not believe we should give you $5 material if you only paid 50 cents!! We were completely open and up front about the remnants and clearance items. We have one contractor for example that buys that material for Irish pubs, and he loves it. Some customers use it for their attic floors, some customers use it on trucks. The bottom line is we cannot read the customers mind, and if we are telling you there is no warranty, and it is sold as is, and we are telling you and showing you even what is wrong, how can you come back and say to us that we told you you were buying "good" flooring for 50 cents per square foot?

At the end of the day, we could not take back the material for 2 reasons, #1 the odd lots and clearance items are sold as final sales, and #2 we could not replace the material with select and better.

This customer in particular has been personally harrassing me since he purchased the wood, and only stopped after we sent a cease and desist notice as he was calling my personal cell phone at 3 a.m and 5 a.m and texting me rude and profane messages over the Christmas holiday period, and it is difficult to know why a customer buys something or what goes on in their head. If we told him it was select and better and he got this material, he would have every right to complain and if such a mistake were to happen we would make it right. But in this case, we showed him, and did everything possible to even talk him out of buying it. We would have been more happy if his wife came to the showroom, told him she does not like knots from the beginning. Bottom line is he liked it and his wife did not.

Unfortunately, because of this customer we have since decided to stop selling remnants and odd lots items on our web page. Its basically the same idea as Leon's or The Brick when you go to their section of returned and scratched items, you get it for a discount but you can't go back and complain that there is a scratch when you knew that is what you were buying...Anyway we sell them now to a liquidator, and he sells the items at auction or on kijiji. We found it was just attracting the wrong type of customer. We do apologize to the customers that were taking advantage of this discounted material, we can direct you to the liquidator that sells it now if you still want to purchase it. It just is not worth the hassles of selling those product in the store.

We apologize to the customer as he was very frustrated, however the reason he claims his order was delayed is that he never actually put a deposit on the material. His order was highly customized, in he wanted hickory hand scraped in three different widths with a custom color and with the bevels and the grains contrasting. His first issue was he never agreed to the price, as we told him it would be $9 per square foot, and he kept insisting that our web page says $6.99. So there was a period of going back and forth where we kept explaining that the price on our web page is for what we have in stock, in our 4 regular colors of hickory, and only on the 7 inch width. When he finally agreed on the price, he did not want to put a deposit on the material because he claimed he was a contractor and all he needed was to send us a purchase order. We explained to him, that we are not able to do the needful on his order, and purchase the raw lumber, have it milled, hand scraped, and do the custom finishing that he wanted unless we got a 20% deposit, and the balance prior to delivery. Unfortunately we are not a big enough business to process a $25,000 order with only a faxed purchase order as security for the order. What would happen if he changes his mind? Or if he just abandons the order altogether. We have a policy, and it stands for all customers. Then when he was finally ready to put the deposit down, we did not have any material in stock, and customer was upset because it would take another 3-4 weeks. We apologize to the customer, but we need a deposit to hold any order, and especially if we are going to do a customized hand scraped. If he would have put in his deposit when he first wanted the wood, he would have had it within 3-4 weeks. However the delay in our opinion was not caused by us, it was caused by the customers refusal to first agree to the price that we quoted, and second to put down a deposit. On our part, we would have loved to do the order. There is no reason why we would turn down an order, but as a business policy we need to be fair to both the customer, and also to ourselves. We hope you understand.

There was absolutely nothing wrong with the floor when it was installed, and customer actually contacted us about a year following her installation to complain of cupping.

Anyone in the flooring industry will experience complaints of cupping and gapping, and this is because wood expands with moisture and contracts with dryness, and maple especially when we start to go wider is going to be a bit more problematic.

We inspected the home twice, and on the first inspection the first thing we did was check the humidity in the home and discovered the moisture content was over 60%. We then advised customer to put a dehumidifier in the home to remove some of the excess moisture, and we returned about 6 months later to re-assess the floor. With the de-humidifier in the home the cupping decreased about 75%, but was still evident especially in the main hallway and in parts of the second floor. At this point, we explained to her that the only way to eliminate the cupping was to have the floor re-sanded completely, and we offered to pay for half the sanding. Sandra did not want to have the floor sanded at all, and this is where she came up with the excuse that the floor was cupping because it was installed too tight. I explained to her, that the floor was not installed tight as we removed one of the baseboards and there was ample space for contraction in between the floor and the wall. She wanted us to replace the boards that were cupped, and in our opinion that would only lead to more problems down the road as by replacing so many boards it would harm the integrity of the flooring. Aside from the offer to sand her floor, we also gave her the the number to a few floor inspectors, and explained to her that if she got an independent inspectors report saying that the reason for the cupping was due to tight installation, than we would replace the boards as she wished. An inspection report costs about $250-$300, but I told her that my opinion was that any time you see cupping to the extent that she had, is exclusively because of moisture. I sent her some articles from the hardwood flooring association that helped illustrate this, as it is a very common problem with maple, especially in new home construction, and especially when the floor is installed in the summer months.

What I am going to do is attach some literature with regards to the importance of maintaining humidity in the home. Our warranty, and most manufacturers warranty state that humidity in the home should be kept at between 40 and 50%. Usually when we see gapping or shrinking, it is because moisture in the winter goes below 20% and when we see cupping it is when it is very humid. It is very important to maintain moisture in the house. In Sandra's case, our offer to sand her floor still stands, and it is not because we are trying to cheat her, it is because it really is the only way to remove the cupping. If we remove the boards and replace them with new ones you will only have more issues. The best way to fix that is to sand and refinish the floor, and we will pay half the cost. The cause is only because they had too much moisture in the house for the first year the floor was installed. Here are the links to the articles on humidity and hardwood flooring: http://hardwoodfloorsmag.com/articles/article.aspx?articleid=1236&zoneid=2
http://www.woodfloordoctor.com/_how_tos/articles/science_behind_moisture_wood/science_behind_moisture_wood.shtml

Actually we remember this customer. We not only sent the extra wood, we also installed the balance for him at no charge. At the time we were prefinishing our material at a very large, well known branded finishing plant in Etobicoke that was doing private lable finishing for us. There was a mistake from the factory, as they labeled the boxes the square footage for 4 1/4 that they produced, while our material was 4 inches. Once we were notified of the shortage, we found out why it happened and how it happened and we implemented a solution. There was a delay as we had to wait for the next production run to run extra material. We delivered the shorted material to the customer, and we also installed the extra material at no charge as a show of good faith. Contrary to what he says, this is not standard practice, and it is such an isolated incident that it happened over 3 years ago and I still remember the details. What bothers me however is that when we settled the problem, I went to his home, I apologized to his face and we shook hands. But I guess in this day and age of the internet it is his right to complain. We do feel we tried our best to right the situation.

Marino is only telling us half the story. First of all, when he purchased the floor he worked out a discount based on the fact that we would both supply AND install. Based on the knowledge that we had already purchased material from us, we went waived the $50 fee for measuring his home. When we arrived at his home, he advised that he already had 3 boxes left over from his previous installation(he had installed his living and dining room and now was doing his family room and hallway). Our measurement tally showed 418 square feet, and based on 418 square feet we told him he needed 450 square feet. Now this is where the squabbling begins: he tells us that we should use HIS 3 left over boxes and we told him we cannot warranty the installation if we start mixing material, because we do not know if his material will fit together with ours. He insisted that he only wants to buy 400 square feet and that we use his 3 boxes for waste. When we told him we could not do that, he went ahead with his purchase of the material of 450 square feet, but cancelled our installation service, and proceeded to install with his previous installers. Now, at the end of the job, he used ALL of the 450 square feet that we supplied, and he was trying to return the original 3 boxes that he had left over from his previous installation!! He did not even buy those boxes from us. So my question to Mario is if you were so confidant of your measurements, and you hired your own installers to install for you, why did you order the 450 square feet? John did tell you he required 450 square feet to do the job, but the question here is not the footage, it was the fact that you were trying to get rid of the 3 boxes that you had left over from your other job. When Three Towers told you they would not use the material, you went ahead and purchased the full amount you needed, fired Three Towers from the installation and then try to return the wood that you bought from someone else. Seriously, 3 or 4 times a year we get people trying to return wood that we did not sell to them. They change the stickers, even going to the extent of filling a box with off cuts from the installation and bringing it back. This is just some of the things we deal with.

With respect to our environmental policy, we are dead serious when we source our material. All of our suppliers have a forest management plan, especially the suppliers of exotic wood. Our own staff goes to Brazil, Colombia and Panama 3 times a year and visits our suppliers. We know them very well, and we simply would not do business with anyone if we had the slightest inclination that they were selling us any type of illegally logged timbers. I have seen the re-planting programs, the logs are selectively harvested. I have seen it all and we are extremely serious about our dedication to buying only from companies that respect the environment.

Thanks kindly for the review. We really appreciate it and it was a pleasure working for you and Vivek.