Empire today
Empire customer review My experience - Hardwood floor insttllation

After reading a lot of negative reviews regarding Empire Today, I guess I can say that my wife and I were lucky with our installation of hardwood floors. The salesperson was polite and informative and didn’t pressure us into a sale. I did my research beforehand, measured my rooms and came up with a price for the job that I thought was fair, and this was the price that was finally agreed to.

We choose Armstrong wood flooring and I made sure to go out and inspect all the unopened boxes on the installer’s van to make sure they were what we ordered. They were.

The contractor arrived on time (a crew of 5) and worked all day installing hardwood on our 2nd floor and on the stairs leading to the 2nd floor. Five men were used and completed the job in 10 hours. We kept an eye on the crew to make sure that they laid down the correct floor liner, etc.

As far as the finished product is concerned, the floors themselves look great. They went inside all the closets and most of the molding looks good too. Towards the end they began to rush and there were some noticeable holes and splinters in a couple pieces of the molding, but nothing major that I couldn’t fix with a little bit of putty. There were some glue stains on the floor, but not many – maybe half a dozen small stains. Again, in the scheme of things, no big deal.

My big problem was that they were a little rough with moving our furniture and put numerous dings and dents in the dressers and bureaus, mostly on the corners and feet. If our furniture has been new (which it was not) I REALLY would have been upset about this, but again, most of the damage here was easily fixed with a combination of furniture pens and wood putty. I suspect that some of this damage could have been avoided if they had come back a second day rather than trying to finish the job in one day. OTOH…there was a BIG part of me that was glad they were able to finish the job the same day. The clean-up job inside and out was OK but not great. Again, they were in a hurry to leave.

So, it looks like we were fortunate because the worker who did the steps (a custom job) obviously knew what he was doing, as did the regular floor installers. The floors actually look really good. I think if you could be guaranteed to get this particular crew you would be ok, as long as you kept an eye on them moving furniture. Of course, we all know that it’s always a crap shoot with what crew you get.

So, although I have read LOTS of negative reviews about Empire Today, for our particular experience to be completely honest, I would say the following:

SALESMAN: good

PRICE: competitive with what my own research showed

CREW: large crew of 5 who worked hard and did a very good job on the floors and stairs. They needed to be a bit more careful with moving the furniture.

As always, your mileage may vary.

JLT
September

Company: Empire today
Country: USA

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