My husband myself and our 5 children were planning to build our dream log home. This had been a labor of love for many years. We found the land, had the plans drawn, and had all the financing in place.
We began getting bids and were quite excited about the bid and promises we recieved from Southland Log Homes. We were working with the local office just outside of Nashville. I, fortunately, had the salesperson and the local sales manager write out the prelimanary bid on SLH (Southland Log Homes) letter head.
Southland had a local builder, Cliff Jones, contact me to secure the dry in cost. We were told that we would need to send in aproximately $15,000 with our contract and give the builder $5,000 to secure our bids. We wrote the checks and began celebrating the begining of what we thought was our dream. Ha Ha!
My Sales person, Jack Fanning, sent in only a portion of the contract. What he told me was part of the contract, he sent to the company as a change order, as if it were additions rather than what he had told me was inclusive of the contract. Obviously the company wanted to charge a great deal more.
Once again I had fortunately dated and copied all the parts of the contract. With the same date on all papers it was quite obvious that we had been mislead. The Vice President of the company came in to meet with me and gladly promised to returne my deposit, hoping to avoid a law suit, or doing what was promised. He also promised to encourage the builder to refund the deposit and all agreed that they were not legally, but morally and professionally responsible to help get this back.
I Did get the SLH deposit back, weeks later than promised, but I did get it. I still have not gotten the deposit from the builder back, $5000, and of course he has changed his phone number. All my requests for help from SLH have fallen on deaf ears.
We are now moving on with a more reputable helpful company. I wanted to share this and hope that no one else has to go through what our family has.
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