Norwegian Wood

All we wanted was for the floor to be fixed

We originally hired Norwegian Wood in 2008 for the installation of salvaged butternut flooring in our triplex apartment. At the time they did what appeared to be a great job. Fast forward to 2011 and the sealant on 15 floor boards is mysteriously coming up, both on the 1st and second floor. We contacted our GC who had initially hired Norwegian and set up a meeting. Norwegian explained to me that they would lightly sand down the boards and coat them again with tung oil so they would match the rest of the floor. We would have to be out of the apartment for two weeks and the job would be roughly $5K. Upon our return after two weeks of work we walked into the place and found that nothing much had changed the floors simply looked like the cleaning lady was here. There was no change in the markings on the floor boards and if anything they became darker. Extremely frustrated we called norwegian to come and look at the problem. They sent two men on two separate occasions. The first said, oh they should have used a water based sealant on the floor when they did the job and the second said they did the job they were supposed to. The floor was originally coated with tung oil and they put another layer on, sorry if it doesn't look any different, but for an extra $2K on top of the $5K that this was already costing us, we could have them scrape the boards and put a few extra coats of tung oil on. Infuriated we called our architect who was able to get in contact with the manufacturer of the butternut. He came from Vermont to see the floors and said he had never seen this happen before and he installs flooring similar to this all over the city. The manufacturer then agreed to give us 15 replacement boards but he could not install them. He also did not think that the top coating on the floor was tung oil as it appeared to be some sort of water based sealant. He suggested that before we replace all of the boards that we test out small areas to investigate what Norwegian really used on the floor originally, we could accomplish this by testing a few small spots with a water based seal. We went back to Norwegian with this new information and they gave us a quote for $2,600. to install 15 new boards and coat them in tung oil. Fast forward a few weeks and I start to get harassing phone calls from a woman named Sheila in what I assume to be the billing department. She begins to threatening me that they are going to take lien out on our apartment if we don't pay the remaining balance on a job that they simply did not do properly. We would never have hired them for $5K to do a maintenance coating on our floors. We hired them to fix the problem areas on the floor and they simply did not do there job. All we wanted was for the floor to be fixed and looking like it originally did even with some wear and it seemed that no one could help us.