Atlas Floors, Carpet One the RIP-OFF flooring specialists in San Antonio Texas

If you are ever in the market for new floors in San Antonio, Texas make sure that you stay clear of Atlas Floors, Carpet One. This family business, whose advertising slogan is, "Making rooms beautiful since 1948" actually does one of the worst flooring jobs that I have ever seen. What's worse is that they don't care.

To help you understand the entire situation you should know that I was a single father of one child and my fiance was a single mother of two and we were both about to move into our first home. As you can imagine we were elated over both the wedding and our home. What we were not elated about however, was the condition of the floors in the home we purchased. The floors had two different kinds of linoleum and three different color carpets and all of it was in bad shape. It seemed only natural to replace the flooring and upgrade it to something that would add beauty and value to our new home.

You would think that we would have gone about searching for companies on the internet, diligently researching facts about each choice in San Antonio. After all, there are considerable amounts of "big name" flooring companies in San Antonio. Instead it was a choice that we made almost on instinct, a family owned business with people native to our town, that's who we wanted to use. Besides, we never heard anything bad about them, then again, we never heard anything good either.

It was our first meeting at Atlas Floors, Carpet One that sticks out so clearly now. Upon arriving at the showroom we were greeted by a salesman who informed us that his job was salesman, designer and project manager and he would be with us from start to finish "to ensure it's done right". We related our entire situation from single parents to newlyweds to new homeowners to our first big home project. We stressed that the reason we chose Atlas Floors was because while we knew it would cost us more, we were most concerned with quality, both in product and in craftsmanship. Our salesman agreed and we set a date for him to come and see the homes layout and interior so he could make his recommendations.

The following weekend my fiance and I arrived back at the store to see what the recommendations were. We were offered a wide range of products and colors and given some choice as to accents that could be used to give the home a better feel. The project manager told us how he arrived at his recommendations and showed us sketches of how he thought the house might be layed out. We took samples of wood and tile back to the house and made our decisions. The only thing to do was close on our house and wait for the project to start.

Because we were remodeling the home changing the color scheme seemed like a necessity. We would not be able to move into the house until after the flooring project was completed so we decided to spend the two days we owned the home before the project started repainting the entire homes interior. Married for only a week and still two weeks away from moving into our first home we called all of our friends and had a painting party like you have never seen. To our surprise, despite the amount of help we had the house did not get entirely finished. We knew we would have to spend most of our evenings finishing the painting once the contractors had left our home for the day.

The first day of our project came and I called in late to work so I could come out to our new home and meet the people working on our floors. To my dismay I found the project manager sitting outside my home waiting on the tileing contractors. He told me that he was tired of these guys being late which I took to mean that they had a history of being late to projects. I reassured myself that although consistent tardiness is not a desirable trait in someone who works in my home that they must have been very good or the tardiness would not be tolerated by the project manager.

Like a s****.> When I saw the contractors were allowed to stay on the project, and in my home, I decided to take off many mornings and even some full days from work over the next two weeks as I tried to control the damage being done.

To summarize the problems faced in our project I have itemized the major problems below;

Tile sub-contractors used our personal belongings on several occasions and destroyed or defaced several items;
A 50' extension cord we had purchased was used and left with grout and cement on it. Our new broom and dust pan was used and left with a split broom handle and broken dust pan. Our vacuum cleaner was used for the hose attachment to pick up rock and concrete debris, this is a problem because our personal equipment was used and it filled a bag and no replacement bag was provided. New trash cans were used and left filthy and caked with debris and in need of being scrubbed out.

Tile sub-contractors did not finish out walls in both bathrooms where work was done. We have had excessive problems with cockroaches entering our home through these holes. We were told by the company we would have to hire someone else to come repair the walls.

Additionally several tile problems were located in the bathrooms including; Border tile being improperly placed. The border was to be placed as a border but instead was placed running through the middle of the shower. Only one bathroom received a border. Both bathrooms were supposed to have a border. (Sub-contractors report informing the project manager who by their account told them, Just do the master bath). Tile work in both showers is uneven due to the drop-in job by the plumbers of the tubs. The tile sub-contractor foreman reports that while he noticed the tubs were not even he did not want to contact the project manager about it because he was afraid he would be told to Wait for the plumbers to fix it.

He expressed that would be a problem because it would result in him not being able to get to another job that he had lined up for that same week. I reported the tubs being uneven to the project manager. He came to check the tubs with a level and reported them to actually be level. It took me leaving work, driving to Wal-Mart, buying a simple ninety-seven cent level, and showing it to the project manager before he admitted there was a problem. It wasn't until I did this that the problem was conceded. I had to actually convince the project manager that there was indeed a problem that was obvious to everyone.

After the tubs were reset the tile sub-contractors were recalled to finish the job. Despite asking for new sub-contractors because of the poor job previously done, coupled with the fact we felt they would do a poor job for having to come back, we were provided with the same sub-contractors. The previous sub-contractors came and did indeed do a poor job on the regrouting of tile in the bathtubs.

Project clean up was also extremely unprofessional. Cut tile was left in the kitchen, garage, fireplace and lawn. Grout was left stuck to a bathroom doorpost and sidewalk. Despite having to move the oven in order to tile the floor, the oven was left in the kitchen area and never returned to its position. Shower and toilet parts were left lying in several areas of house. Boxes from job parts, soda cans and fast food trash from lunch breaks were left strewn around the back patio area and left on the fireplace.

As previously mentioned plumbers installed both tubs without leveling them. Although the tile for the shower backsplash was raised several inches to be in line with current building methods the plumbers did not install new shower parts in like manner which resulted in low hanging/odd looking shower heads. The guest bathrooms' bath spout was not set correctly. This resulted in a service call to the plumbers after the competition of Atlas Floor job in order for them to reset tub spout. Despite alerting both plumbers and project manager, the hallway closet where the plumbers cut the wall out for tub access was not reset into the wall.

Baseboards/runners were removed from the master bathroom walls and subsequently lost. Baseboards/runners were removed from under all cabinets in both bathrooms and kitchen and also subsequently lost. The initial explanation given was that there must have been linoleum that ran up on the wall and, upon removal, the baseboard area looked poor. After providing pictures of pre-project work showing the missing parts actually existed I was told my wife must have removed them and lost them.

The project ran over. Repeated trips were made over the next few days of the following week to correct "problems" that had arisen (none of those problems made this report as they were corrected). While I can accept that any given project is prone to run long this is not reasonable when the project runs over due to a consistent tardiness from sub-contractors. Also unacceptable is poor installation/workmanship resulting in repeated trips to fix the same items.


Finally, just three months after the last contractor left our home we were disturbed to find another example of substandard work. The tile in several places in our house is starting to come apart in the grout work. Tile in the kitchen in several places and the guest bathroom show cracks running the length of several tiles and in some case branching off in different directions. After phone calls to several flooring companies to get an explanation of why this happens we were told repeatedly, and by several different companies, it is common to see that when the floor is not prepared correctly before the tile and grout are laid. We were not surprised by continued findings of their sub par efforts.

There is little to say to accurately describe the frustration that we face as the victims. The only thing more frustrating than the continued problems we faced was that we had to fight our project manager day after day. Two weeks after the end of the project, with the project still incomplete, I contacted the president of the company about the problems. He passed the issue to his sister, the vice president of the company who was in charge of that location. We had a meeting in our home my wife, the vice president, the project manager and I in which it became very apparent that although we had problems from the outset of our project and nearly every day thereafter the project manager never let her know. Indeed it seemed as though she had never even been made aware that sub-contractors her company employed had committed theft.

Unfortunately the company refused to make things right. They offered a small potion of money which wouldn't cover a new company coming in to repair the problems or the offer to come in and do it themselves. I answered that letter with a counter offer of money and the explanation that I wouldn't trust Atlas Floors/Carpet One in my home ever again and that they certainly did nothing in their first attempt at my project to make me think they could get it don't correctly this time. There was no response to this letter so we decided to file a complaint with the Better Business Bureau. This turned out to be fruitless. So be forewarned, Atlas Floors/Carpet One is the biggest RIP OFF you will find in San Antonio when it comes to flooring. Don't fall for their sales pitch or you will be out a tremendous amount of money and have nothing but an incomplete project and broken tile flooring to show for it.

David
San Antonio, Texas
U.S.A.