Daily Home Renovation Tips

In Part 32, The End?,  we   thought we had written our last article on our replacement front door mis-adventures. We were wrong.

If you recall, we reached an agreement with the building supply retailer whereby we accepted a monetary credit against the cost of the door as well as a further deferral of the payment due date due to the many issues we experienced with both the initial door installation and the customer service. This payment deferral meant that we would not have to pay for the door for 12 months from the final installation date of the second replacement front door, which will be mid-June 2009.

We didn’t ask for but also received a $200 pre-paid gift card.

We signed the settlement agreement received from the building supply retailer on June 26^th and faxed it back to the company the same day. A week later, we had already received the gift card.

Remember an earlier article we wrote about always checking the credit card statement  from anyone, including retailers?  Well, 4 weeks after June 26^th we received the credit card statement from the building supply retailer.

You know where I am going with this, right? The monetary credit had not been applied against the cost of the replacement front door. And, the payment due date had not been deferred to mid-June 2009.

As Yargo, the Parrot in the Disney animated classic movie Aladdin would say “Squawk, why am I not surprised!”.

So, I called Amy, the level 3 customer support representative who had been dealing with our case for the past several months. Of course, timing is everything or nothing. Her voice mail said that today she was starting 6 consecutive weeks of intensive training and for any messages I should call Gill.

I called Gill, who was not there, so I left a message explaining the situation.

I then called the customer service phone number on the credit card statement and reached an honest to goodness live person. After she confirmed that there was nothing in their computer system about the monetary credit or deferral extension, she transferred me to the actual store. From there I spoke with two more people until I reached the store manager, Matt who definitely remembered the door installation from hell (my words, not his).

He indicated that the area manager who had to actually process the credit on our account had not done so yet (4 weeks later) and he sent her an email. He did take down our credit card account number to save me from having to actually spend more of my time and gas in our car to travel to the store to process the payment deferral. He said he would do it over the phone and I should see it on our next monthly statement, including the monetary credit.

So, again, always check your credit card bills.

And, yes, this will not be the last article on our replacement front door. At a minimum in about a month’s time we’ll let you know if the credit and payment deferral extension was on that statement. Heck, we might even write about our priming and painting of the bare wooden door frame, yes, with pictures of our second replacement front door.

To continue to the next article in this series, simply select this link to Part 34.