Unprofessional and terrible customer service
Thames Valley Refinishing
The poorest of the poor - we booked Howard to come and repolish a stainless steel sink as part of our kitchen refurbishment - it was an awkward size and difficult to source the exact same item. So we talked to him and sent photos and he said he could make it much better. The overall cost was to be £200. On the day, he arrived with a "new tool" he was very proud of, but he had forgotten to charge it. So he started work but kept having to stop to recharge it. After half an hour, maybe 45 minutes I passed through the kitchen and he commented that he was having a difficult time with the sink and it wasn't coming up as he wanted. I had to go out so I left and said I would look at it when I got back. When I came back he had left site. And when I inspected it he had made some terrible circular swirly scratches with his machine on the draining section and around the tap hole. The sink was completely ruined and unusable.
I then had the stress of sourcing a new sink and getting it to site which was no small issue (we had to collect it from Peterborough - we are in Buckinghamshire). When I asked him to contribute to the cost of the new sink, and the petrol (several times I might add over several emails) he flatly refused. He said the difference wasn't that great to me (as I had managed to source a sink at a quarter of the price they usually are) so he judged it purely on financial outlay. I explained the stress, inconvenience the loss of a whole day, but no - he was adamant he was very very sorry but he wasn't going to be contributing or taking any actions to show he was sorry - just throwing words at me in an email.
In my view, what is important is not that people make mistakes (albeit in this case I am minded to think he was negligent to carry on making further scratches in a second location once he saw the effect in one place on the sink) it's about how they put them right. His solution was that he wouldn't charge us. As if that absolved him from all responsibility for what he had done.
He even suggested that the sink might have had some special coating he didn't know about - even though he boasted in the first email that he had been doing this job for 35 years. He also said that if that were the case I should have used a specialist firm. I'm not sure how he expected me, a customer to know there was a coating if he couldn't tell.
Anyway the upshot is I would not recommend anyone use this person just in case it goes wrong - you won't get anything more than empty words if it does. Very disappointing - I always try to support local trades - but this went horribly wrong.