......or so the saying goes.
On December 28, 2012, my husband Arnold Gee and I bought
the home that was to be the fulfillment of our lifelong
dream.
On June 1, 2013, that home flooded from
the top down, as a result of a ruptured toilet supply pipe.
We called our insurance company and they told us to call
ServiceMaster Professional Cleaning of Chambersburg to do the dry-out.
We did, and, not knowing any better, we also hired them to do the renovation/ repair
work (to the tune of our $24000 insurance settlement!), based on
the prompt and professional response of their dry-out team, and on the
fact that they said they could begin working on the house right away,
and would probably be done by September. Since it was mid-summer and
all the other contractors in our area were pretty well booked
up, that sounded pretty good, and so we went ahead and hired
them to do the job.
Five months later, we fired them. Our home was still not finished - nearly
every phase of the repair had been bungled: the recently installed
drywall needed to be cut open to repair wiring damaged by ServiceMaster "professionals" while
reinstalling the electrical receptacles, and to insert a beam in the
kitchen that the drywallers "forgot" needed to be installed; our curtains
and cabinets, which were undamaged by the water, were badly damaged by
ServiceMaster personnel, and our kitchen was still a tent in the backyard and a BBQ
grill.
Now here it is Christmastime, here we sit in our ruined house, and we
have to come up with more money to pay a different contractor to repair
the things that ServiceMaster Professional Cleaning messed up, such as
levelling out the drywall around the windows and doors so that the
woodwork can be installed; $300 to an electrician to reinstall the
outlets that ServiceMaster's team of "professionals" loused up by
cutting the openings in the drywall too large, and still more to patch
the holes in the drywall left from ServiceMaster Professional Cleaning's
botched job; $172 to the furnace
more