4 years ago
My wife and I just recently purchased a foreclosur...
My wife and I just recently purchased a foreclosure from the city and needless to say it needed some MAJOR repairs. One of the first items on our list was to have the furnace replaced and ductwork run to the second floor. After exhaustively researching and reading reviews on the many HVAC companies in Milwaukee we settled on a couple of companies, one of which was Donovan and Jorgenson. We were excited because they had stellar reviews, were employee owned and had worked in Milwaukee for a long time.
The scheduling process was easy and the estimator promptly came to our house a few days later. He was pleasant and easy-going throughout the process as we chatted about where to install the new ductwork, and also gave us some cool information on the relic of a furnace we were replacing. As things were wrapping up, we asked about a manufacturer credit for recycling the old furnace that another company had told us about and whether D&J offered anything similar. Something about this comment really irked the estimator and his tone totally changed. He became very defensive and was spouting off about how much work D&J does and how great their quality is, none of which we weren't doubting. He then walked out, we exchanged email addresses, and he told us he was going on vacation for the weekend and it would take a couple of days to get the quote. His curt and dismissive attitude towards the end was a little off-putting but we tried to give him the benefit of the doubt - he was probably just tired and would be more ready to discuss the project after some much needed time off.
A week went by and we didn't hear from him. We figured with the vacation he needed some more time. Again, no big deal. After two weeks I got a little concerned and called him at the office. He told me it was sitting on his desk and because it was complicated and required some serious "engineering" he was just about to get to it, which I interpreted as having not started yet. At that point, it was nearing the end of October and we were running out of time and we went with another bid.
We just finished having our system installed and the other company knocked it out in a day and said the install was pretty straight forward. At this point I'm mostly disappointed that we did our research in finding D&J and were let down but some unprofessional behavior. A simple conversation about our project being outside of D&J's scope or a back log of larger projects preventing them from doing ours would have sufficed. Even a phone call letting us know the quote would take a couple of weeks instead of a couple of days would have been appreciated. This is not our first home renovation and we've dealt with many contractors in the past. I can honestly say I've never felt so dismissed or that our business was so unimportant. I hope our experience is not a normal occurrence when working with Donovan and Jorgenson.