negative yelper not telling the whole story..

[Mikey P]

I wanted them to clean two tile showers and one tile floor. The owner had me send him some photos. We spent half an hour on the phone talking about what the problem areas were. I asked what the next steps were. I was told to call the office and schedule an in-person estimate with his son. Did that. Son shows. Said he would get back to me with estimate. Didn't hear for a couple of days, so I called the office and asked for estimate via email. Within a day, I got the emailed estimate for both showers and the floor. I schedule the cleaning. Mind you, I'm wanting this all done before installing new frameless shower doors. The door people are waiting on all of this process. So..... I have the shower door people make a special trip to remove one of the shower enclosure (the one I was nervous about doing myself). This leaves my daughter without a shower for a week. We make do, looking forward to those nice clean showers that were coming. The day the cleaners were to do their work, my husband and I removed the shower doors before he had to leave for work. Then, I spent the next couple of hours removing the enclosure and adhesive (mind you, I was taking work away from the shower door people). The owner shows up, right on time, and stays for about an hour, going through the three rooms, again telling me all the problem areas. I figure this is just to let me know that it won't look perfect. I didn't expect perfect. But I did expect them to clean. After all, what was all that with the long phone conversation and the estimate with written bid for the work? Anyway, I was basically told that there was practically nothing they could do for me on ANY of the jobs. Well, I spent the next three hours trying to get the showers as clean as I could (recall, there were no enclosures so I couldn't use a whole lot of water.)

My emailed response..



Hi *****

I read your review on Yelp last night and I must say I was surprised. I totally understand that you were disappointed that we couldn't clean your showers, as I was as well. We take great pride in delivering great results and thrilled clients. Unfortunately in your situation I knew we were not going to be able to provide what you needed in the amount of time we had to work with.

As I read your review I couldn't help but think that I possibly didn't make it clear enough as to why I was so hesitant to proceed with the cleaning.

You had two issues that were going to prevent us from giving you a good value for your money. The first being the color seal product you had applied on the grout. If we had used our steam cleaning process with enough pressure and heat to remove the mold that was present in some of the grout, we would have started to remove the color seal. I use the term "started" because I've been hired many, many times to do this intentionally on flooring and color seal coatings never come off with just pressure alone. We always have to resort to using stripping agents and high pressure and heat to get complete removal.

The second issue was, if we had attempted to remove the color seal, the aggressiveness of the heat, pressure and chemicals would have damaged your already failing silicone/caulking . If you recall, to properly remove and replace the silicone would have lead to adding two or three days to the project to sanitize and dry out the open cavity and a return visit to replace the silicone. To further delay the install of the shower doors is something you said you didn't want to do. We also didn't have time in our schedule to return in a reasonable amount of time to reinstall the new silicone.
The presence of color seal was never discussed during our phone conversation or I would have told my son Davis to test a few areas to see if it the product was sturdy enough to stand up to steam cleaning and or find out what sort of strippers and how high of water pressure would have been needed to completely remove the coating. While Davis has cleaned many showers over the years, he has never dealt with the (rare) product that you used. He has not seen the inconsistent removal of those types of consumer type products that occurs when steam cleaning is performed. if you look at the notes he put on the quote he sent you, he listed " Failed color seal and light mold in both upstairs showers, heavy mold, soap scum, and grout erosion in downstairs bath, light cleaning on bath floors to not remove existing color seal, return visit may be necessary if caulk in upper showers has failed. Please accept both of our apologies for not testing the color seal during the estimate the to see if even light cleaning was possible.
You didn't mention any of this in your review so I have to believe I just didn't make it clear enough of all the risk involved. I do recall telling you that I thought it would be best to reapply the color seal product to the few areas it had flaked off as a better alternative than to trying to remove it and cause further damage. I know I gave you loads of information that day and I'm not surprised that some of it was forgotten.
All of this lead us to both agree, or so I thought, that you would willingly remove the old silicone yourself since that was the only service that we could provide for you that would not potentially put off the door install.
Again, my apologies for the inconvenience and our part in the "perfect storm" that lead you to having to remove the old silicone yourself. In hindsight I wish I would have insisted on doing that for you..
I hope you are enjoying your new doors and if you would like some help in removing and replacing your silicone joints, I'll be in town around December 11th for a few days and would like to make it up to you.
Thanks!
Mike@ Connoisseur