Fencing Company Scam? (install, privacy, place)

[BuckeyeBelle]

I'd like to know if others have encountered this problem.

We recently hired a fence company to install a fence at our home. They brought the wrong fence on the day they came to install it, and said they could not get the slats for the fence I had ordered for at least a month.

I would have had no problem waiting a month for the slats I wanted, if they had told me before they had set all the posts and horizontal boards. With all the posts and horizontals in, I felt like they had me over a barrel and they knew it.

Later I was telling a friend about the situation and she told me that several years ago a different company had done the same to her. In her case, she insisted on the slats she had ordered, and the company never came back to install the fence--she had to go to the BBB to get them to honor their contract.

I'm wondering if this is a common scam with fencing companies around here?

[lexingtony]

Dare I ask which fence company gave you this run-around? I'm going to be installing a new privacy fence in the near future and I'd like to steer clear of the one you used.

[BuckeyeBelle]

I used Roark Fencing. I haven't had a fence installed before, so I don't know how to compare them, other than to an "ideal". Ideally, I would have the fence I picked out when the salesman showed me the choices. Ideally, the gates would both be where I told/showed the salesman I wanted them.

Instead,I have a different fence, and one gate in the right spot, and the other about two or three feet from where we wanted it.

My advice--if they spray paint on your grass to show the workers where the gate should go, make sure that the weather or the workers unloading all the wood and walking all over the place doesn't wipe away the paint. By the time they were doing the gates, there wasn't a bit of paint left.