""Marry in Haste, Repent at Leisure"", or so the saying goes.\r
On December 28, 2012, my husband Arnold Gee and I bought\r
the home that was to be the fulfillment of our lifelong\r
dream.\r
On June 1, 2013, that home flooded from\r
the top down, as a result of a ruptured toilet supply pipe.\r
We called our insurance company and they told us to call\r
ServiceMaster Professional Cleaning of Chambersburg to do the dry-out.\r
We did, and, not knowing any better, we also hired them to do the renovation/ repair\r
work (to the tune of our $24000 insurance settlement!), based on\r
the prompt and professional response of their dry-out team, and on the\r
fact that they said they could begin working on the house right away,\r
and would probably be done by September. Since it was mid-summer and\r
all the other contractors in our area were pretty well booked\r
up, that sounded pretty good, and so we went ahead and hired\r
them to do the job.\r
Five months later, we fired them. Our home was still not finished - nearly\r
every phase of the repair had been bungled: the recently installed\r
drywall needed to be cut open to repair wiring damaged by ServiceMaster ""professionals"" while\r
reinstalling the electrical receptacles, and to insert a beam in the\r
kitchen that the drywallers ""forgot"" needed to be installed; our curtains\r
and cabinets, which were undamaged by the water, were badly damaged by\r
ServiceMaster personnel, and our kitchen was still a tent in the backyard and a BBQ\r
grill.\r
Now here it is Christmastime, here we sit in our ruined house, and we\r
have to come up with more money to pay a different contractor to repair\r
the things that ServiceMaster Professional Cleaning messed up, such as\r
levelling out the drywall around the windows and doors so that the\r
woodwork can be installed; $300 to an electrician to reinstall the\r
outlets that ServiceMaster's team of ""professionals"" loused up by\r
cutting the openings in the drywall too large, and still more to patch\r
the holes in the drywall left from ServiceMaster Professional Cleaning's\r
botched job; $172 to the furnace repairman to replace an electrical\r
connection between the furnace and the thermostat, shorted out when\r
ServiceMaster's demolition team tore the thermostat out of the wall\r
along with the panelling it sat on, without turning off the power supply\r
to the thermostat; money to a carpenter to actually install the support\r
beam that ServiceMaster said they had installed, but didn't.... the\r
list goes on and on. Perhaps the biggest insult of all is the fact that\r
we actually paid $637 of our insurance settlement money for a portajohn\r
for the ServiceMaster employees, who used it for all of five weeks, even\r
though it sat here ON OUR DIME for six months, and all the while, we\r
thought that SERVICEMASTER was paying for it!!!.
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