The downside to being slow is not having many phone calls, but last weekend I was able to do two estimates. I gave them the price and, yep, like always, mine was the highest. They told me that they got estimates for $1 less and .50 cents less a foot. So that means the competition are going to work for half the money they did just over a year ago… half! I know things are rough, but in this small market, why drop the price? Folks have the funds or they would not be doing the work. Oh well, it is all good, I know that it will come around soon and when it does, they will not be able to bring the price back up. They just got in a hole that will be hard to dig out of.
The downside to being slow is not having many phone calls, but last weekend I was able to do two estimates. I gave them the price and, yep, like always, mine was the highest. They told me that they got estimates for $1 less and .50 cents less a foot. So that means the competition are going to work for half the money they did just over a year ago… half! I know things are rough, but in this small market, why drop the price? Folks have the funds or they would not be doing the work. Oh well, it is all good, I know that it will come around soon and when it does, they will not be able to bring the price back up. They just got in a hole that will be hard to dig out of.
I got a call from some folks who went the box store way of hardwood. Well, they did as they were told: put the wood in the house for 3 days, rent the nail gun and have a great time installing. Let's see, there is no felt under the flooring, no plastic on the earth in the crawl and the RH in the crawl is 80-plus. And, yes, the meter gave a reading of 22% in the subfloor. I wonder why it is all jumping off the floor; it is like that cereal (snap, crackle, pop).
They think that it is a wood problem and the box store gave them bad wood. How about more like it's a box store problem with an install that looks like a homeowner did the work? It's not straight and not undercut. They worked off the long wall and they used a nail every 4 inches so the wood is splitting big time. Okay, this is mean, but here goes...you saved a ton of money going to the box store, now what? Sorry, that was ugly, but I would hope the manufacturer would train them better than that and the store would express that the crawl space demands some attention. Take a look at my moisture meter photos in my last post. Maybe we need a box store NWFA class; it sure is going to be painful when the wood folks say, "Nope, not our bad. You did it all wrong!"
