Most Deplorable Company I've Ever Dealt With
Booked an End of Tenancy clean, that we understood was to be completed on a Monday, 5 days before our tenancy finished last August. Given our eventual plight, it’s needless to dwell on minor details, such as his arriving half hour late without bothering to call, but this did set the tone for what would become a chronic and collossal waste of my time that’s still continuing 5 months later. They stayed a few hours, then upt and went, telling me they’d return Wednesday and “finish off regardless of how long we there” (sic). I knew things were taking a turn for the worse, when before I’d even walked home after letting them in the property again, I received a bizarre message from his assistant asking how many hours she was scheduled for. I won’t speculate where Mr C had disappeared to, but when I rolled up Thursday to see if the job was completed, it was more with hope than any expectation the promise would have been kept. Much to my disappointment, it was far from complete and hard to see much progress had been made at all. I reached out again and was reassured they would return on Friday. By this point, being the eve of our tenancy ending at 9am Saturday morning, we were more than a little stressed and come 8.30 in the evening, I couldn’t resist any longer, sending the short & simple message “done?”. As frustrating and painful as the response was, it couldn’t come as a surprise any longer that the answer was no they hadn’t been, and they wouldn’t be coming. I’m a quiet and gentle person and disdain controversy but in the circumstances it was impossible not to point out to him, in the mildest way, that if they could just have told us earlier, we might have had the chance to get someone else in to finish the job. To this I got a barrage of passive aggressiveness that “they couldn’t give us priority over other jobs", that “they don’t work for free”!! blah de blah de blah. We were exhausted and highly stressed, with less than 12 hours to go until our property inspection might take place and so much still to be done.
We'd also paid him for the windows to be cleaned. Whilst I appreciate this was to be carried out by an external contractor, I naively assumed that at the point of taking our money, he would have checked that said person was able to do the work, and of course, despite multiple promises, this hadn’t been done either.
We did actually manage to find someone willing to come at 6am on Saturday, paying extortionate rates, but with my wife mucking in, the property was finished to an ok standard by mid morning so the worst of disasters was averted. The agent gave us leeway to have the windows cleaned at a later time. Mr C gave us date after date when his guy would come, but each passed with no visit & eventually the agency called time on this nonsense.
If any credit could be given to Mr C, it is that he acknowledged the window cleaning and some of the EOT cleaning we had paid for was not complete, and he agreed to refund us for that. The story might have ended there, were it not that they had removed a specialist mop which was included on our inventory, and would cost us £50 to replace. Mr C repeatedly promised to return this, but alas it never happened, and we had to purchase a new one. When the time came for a refund to be processed, I said I would accept his estimate of the hours due, but he'd need to pay for the mop. This led to a further barrage of insanity; he was now no longer going to refund us, but instead send a mystery invoice for further charges!! Regretably, this never arrived, as I would have enjoyed the laughs, but I have sent him a Letter of Intended Action to which no reply was received, so court papers are about to be issued. While I have no doubt I will get my money back through the courts, there will be no compensation to cover all the time he has wasted, nor the extra costs incurred. We are decent people and don’t like to leave negative reviews unless absolutely necessary, but I owe it to the rest of humanity to avoid others being put through all the stress we were.
See you in court Gabriel.
