When we renovated the house a year ago we covered the old terrazzo floors with hardwood, an unnecessary extravagance that we justified by telling ourselves that the floor would last forever.
“It’s no more expensive than replacing carpeting every 10 years,” I told my partner.
“It will last longer than we will, ” he agreed, nodding.
Having justified our decision, we chose a nice reddish wood and put on a high gloss finish; when it was installed it looked great and we complimented ourselves on the wisdom of our investment.
“Is good floor,” agreed Vlad, the Ukrainian floor installer. “It last forever,” he said, stomping on his handiwork with a self-satisfied air.
What we learned quickly was that wood floors are not compatible with pets because every time the dog or a cat walked across the floor they left major scratches. Accordingly, we ended up buying huge area rugs to protect the floor in the living room and dining room and our house now looked like an oriental rug showroom, but the small strips of wood showing through sure looked good.
One day after dinner my partner looked at an uncovered piece of floor and said, “Is the floor buckling?”
With a sick feeling in my stomach I rolled back the rug and sure enough the individual boards were buckling all over the room; worse yet, where some boards had buckled others were separating and there were huge gaps between the individual boards. My partner and I just looked at each other, wide-eyed; I did not mention that if my memory was accurate our warranty had expired the previous week. My memory was not wrong.
The store where we bought the flooring was no help; first they said that the problem was my fault and when I said it wasn’t, they put me on hold for a long time.
“It sounds like the floor was installed wrong,” said a voice who said he was the manager. “Who installed it?”
“You did,” I said.
“Hold please,” said the manager and left for a very long time. “Do you remember the name of the installer?” he asked when he came back.
“Vlad, the Ukrainian,” I said.
“Fuck!” said the manager, an approach that I suspect he did not learn in customer service school. He asked me to hold again but I heard him say, “Vlad did it again,” before he actually put me on hold. After another long wait he came back and gave me Vlad’s number, mentioning that since the warranty was up there was nothing he could do.
“Well it needs to be fixed,” I started to say, but the manager had already hung up.
Vlad was not happy to hear from me. I told him my story and texted him some photos. “Who install this floor?” he demanded.
“You did,” I responded.
Vlad denied that he had installed the floor so I sent him another picture: there he was standing on our shiny, brand new floor, arms folded in satisfaction; behind him you can see his truck through the window: “Floors by Vlad.”
“Is not me,” said Vlad, which sent me into orbit.
After an excruciating negotiation Vlad agreed to come to the house. He did the most cursory of inspections and shook his head. “Terrazzo too damp,” he said. “Floor popping like popcorn.” He shook his head sadly. He said something in Ukrainian that sounded like, “You screwed, buddy.”
Vlad suggested pulling up the entire floor and re-installing it, an unimaginably complex, expensive project that required moving every piece of furniture, emptying every closet, removing the baseboards and shaving all the doors.
It took a minute to absorb this and when I spoke my voice was a bit higher than my typical manly baritone.
“What’s the alternative?” I asked, appalled.
“Bigger rugs,” said Vlad.