Due to a death in the family I needed to locate a cleaning service in a South Chicago area suburb. Someone who would clean the empty house so that it would be in good shape to have potential buyers be impressed with it and make it saleable.
I live 1100 miles from the house and the Realtorlooked in the local yellow pages and found the company: Bear Necessity Cleaning, 16352 So. 76 Ave, Tinley Park, Ill 60477 and Andy, the owner of this part time company, offered to do it to our specificiations for $740.
It took him 2 1/2 weeks longer than he quoted to do the job and when it was 'finished' the Realtor inspected it and found it was poorly done. Both he and I spoke to Andy about the poor job.
On April 7th, in response to my two page fax to him about the quality of the job he spent over 30 minutes on the phone with me telling me how hard he had worked and sweated to do a supurb job. He wanted more money to go back and do the 'additional' work. At this point I had not yet gotten the Emailed photos of his poor work that the Realtor had taken and I was somewhat symphathetic to him. I had him get back in touch with the realtor and they met at the house and the realtor showed Andy the many places that were poorly done and perhaps not even done at all. Andy agreed that the areas needed more work and he spent 2 hours doing them. The Realtor returned just as he was about to leave and again pointed out items that needed to be done. The Realtor and Andy completed the work and I will be paying Andy the agreed $740.
Shortly after the job was finally completed and 2 days after his long phone call to me moaning about how unfair the Realtor was in wanting the work redone (ie: done properly) the Emailed photos arrived and I downloaded them and I saw just how bad a job Andy had done initially. The exterior of the refrigerator was filthy and he had charged me an EXTRA $25 to do the refrigerator and this was one of the things he whined about in his call, how he had done a supurb job on the refrigerator! The dryer in the utility room was also filthy, he clearly hadn't even touched it, walls he claimed to have washed down were obviously dirty, etc.
In his long phone call this fellow told me that if he didn't get paid his $740, he would be forced to inform the buyer of all the deficienceies he had found in the 46 year old house! I told our junior blackmailer that the contracts had already been signed and the house sale had been approved by a buyers inspector and their attorney.
If I had seen the Realtors photos sooner I would have had a much different attitude towards this fellow. He is clearly a slacker and did a poor job, mistakenly thinking that as the owner lived out of state he could get away with it and I would never know that some parts of the job were either not done at all or done so poorly that the effort was worthless.
If you live in Cook County, south of Chicago, you will want to avoid using Bear Necessity Cleaning and Andy Kaczmarek (708 429-0628) of Tinley Park. Call Andy and tell him you've seen his name on this site - maybe it will spur him into doing better work for his next client.
C. Harris
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