Fortress Flooring

If I could put zero stars, I would. We used Fortress Flooring to refinish our floors in our Riverside home. This was the last step of a several month renovation. After our initial consultation, we chose to use them because their prices were competitive, their reviews were decent, and most importantly, they were available to get the work done.

My husband was there for the first step – filling in the missing wood, the sanding and the stain color choice. I will say that the patchwork was good. In terms of stains, we were given a few color options which we assumed would have been the consistent color throughout the entire first floor. Once completed, there were several blotchy spots in the kitchen (see pictures). The kitchen (which is a different type of wood), was significantly lighter. When we asked Dale about this, he agreed but claimed that he had clearly explained this to us (which he did not). Only then did he tell us that that type of wood doesn’t take to stain the same. If we had known this, we would have chosen to stick with a natural wood color instead of staining it darker. It should also be noted that the original flooring (prior to Fortress coming in), was, yes, clearly a different type of wood and the grain was different, but the coloring was pretty much spot on between the two rooms.

Dale reluctantly agreed to send someone out. I then met with one of his workers who showed me a few different options, one being another coat (of either a darker stain or just one more coat of the same stain – this was not clarified to me), or a darker topcoat to be put over the existing stain. I felt the additional stain would look a little closer to the rest of the darker floors, so we went with that. I also questioned the blotchy spots and was told that ‘that’s just how the wood is’. The worker laid the stain in the kitchen and left. Now keep in mind that I obviously couldn’t walk on the freshly stained floors in order to examine the work, so when I returned to see the floors the next day, I was very upset to see that they were EVEN blotchier. It honestly looked like my two-year-old had done it. We sent more pictures to Dale, whose response to my husband was ‘yea, my guys to shitty work a lot’ and after my husband requested he come to see it for himself, Dale agreed to come out a few days later.

My husband then met with Dale who agreed to redo the kitchen section. In conversation about this process, and how to ensure that it is done correctly this time, my husband tried to clarify and possibly even question (for example, some specifics on the stain color, number of coats, etc.), which Dale did not take well too. The plan was for my husband to work on other projects upstairs and to come down to approve the stain color before the final coat was put on, but instead, my husband came down to check on the progress to find that Dale had already put on the final coat. He was packing up his things and said ‘this is your color – we’re done here’ and left.

Now the final poly coat (over the entire floor) still needed to be done and it was always the plan to allow us a week or two to finish a few other projects in our house before he came back to do this final coat. At this point, I was not happy with the floors, but was dealing with a timeline to move into our house and decided they were ‘good enough’. Knowing that he and my husband clearly did not get along, I decided to be the one to meet him at our house for final coat. That interaction was actually pretty pleasant. He patched up a few holes on our second floor and reviewed the timeline for walking on the floor, putting down rugs, etc. He actually even gave some semblance of an apology for the ‘miscommunication’ with my husband at the last meeting. I waited while he did the topcoat and was looking forward to just putting this behind us. Assuming that we were ending this working relationship on a decent note (and that it was the owner of the company doing the work over one of his other employees), I peeked in the front door to see a shiny floor. Again, I could not walk on it at that point to really examine. We said our goodbyes and that was it.

Now unfortunately that is not the end of it. Once the floors were dry enough to walk on, my husband went to the house to complete other work to find several sections that had 1) missing topcoat, 2) hundreds of what looked like bubbles or topcoat laid over dirt, and 3) even some spots that had hairs glued underneath the poly. No – I am not making this up. Please see the pictures.

He sent them to me and I was literally in tears. I went over there to see it for myself. I was honestly in shock because it seemed like Dale literally went in there and applied that topcoat without cleaning the floors first. He knew that we had been doing other work in there in the weeks prior. It was not only the biggest slap in the face, but I honestly just didn’t understand how/why it looked so bad short of h