I had a 10 month nightmare after signing a contract with Home Depot to build a deck. I live in a row house and the first lie the salesman told was that Home Depot would do the whole job, both building the deck and converting two double hung windows into a patio door. Home Depot _does not_ do any window-to-door conversions or anything else that is structural. They would replace windows with other windows or doors with doors. The
salesman said it would have to be two separate contracts because he only wrote contracts for decks.
When the time came to contract for the window-to-door converstion, I was told by the local Home Depot store they didn't do it. It took me 3 months of calling contractors to find a contractor willing to do the window-to-door conversion only. All the other contractors wanted the entire deck job, not just part of it.
After several months (instead of the 8-10 week specified in the contract) the day for installation of the deck finally arrived. The crew was friendly but after a period of time I noticed the crew still standing around, not doing anything. When I went outside to inquire I was told that the footers for the deck would place the right footer in front of the garage door. The measurements were off by 2 feet! I called the salesman who told me "not to worry" and he would come out that evening.
Over a period of several days, a total of three other supervisors came to my house to measure the starting point for the deck and confirmed that, yes, the measurement tech had made a mistake and the deck, as contracted for, would be in front of the garage door. When I asked how this could happen, I was told "the measurement tech must have had a bad day"
Eventually Home Depot submitted plans for a deck that would fit the space to the town for a building permit. The permit was eventually denied because my town requires decks that face (or border) on the street to have steel pillars and Home Depot only builds decks with wood pillars. When I called the customer service # and spoke to (yet another) person, he laughed and said he'd "never heard of such a requirement" to which I replied "well you must not have ever built any decks in the Town of Darby." I called several times, faxed the denial of the building permit and sent numerous email messages and to date (roughly two months later) have not yet had the courtesy of a reply.
I'm not out any money I'm just mad as can be that the people at Home Depot / US Home Systems (a vendor of Home Depot) are so incompetent and have done nothing to apologize to me for this 10 month fiasco.
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