Vintage Hardwood Flooring

An absolute nightmare, this company will find the consumer at fault before looking at any problems with their product. I was so happy with the type of flooring I ordered and hoped that I would later buy more to continue the Jatoba Harwood throughout the three levels of our house. It was more expensive than other flooring, but I was trying to find a Canadian company that appeared to have regard for the environment when harvesting the raw material.

Within two weeks of the install, the floor immediately started to show cracks. I contacted my dealer here in Winnipeg, MB (The Floor Show). They came out twice then called Vintage Flooring who investigated the issue for the next two years. After two short, biased , and dismissive visits, Vintage disallowed my warranty based on an "unusual cold Winnipeg winter". The representative is also the sales rep for these floors, and was more concerned with the negative reviews they had received online than dealing with my floors.

There is now a total of 110 planks of the 1271 square feet of flooring in place and the floor looks like a crackled mess.

In addition, the floor has such a soft finish that it shows scratches and the the top urethane layer of the floor is starting to separate in some spots. These scratches are superficial and were caused due to the soft finishing layer of the floor. The coating appears to be separating in places where the planks have not been exposed to water, contrary to Vintages findings.

The warranty was declined based on the company's assumption that the humidity in the house was below the suggested levels, even though low levels in the flooring was detected a year ago but still within their suggested range. I thought this would be an issue with exotic floors and cold arid conditions in Winnipeg but was reassured this would definately not be an problem. I was told to put in a humidifier prior to the floors being installed which I did. You would think that if you follow the manufacturer & dealers suggestion for care, there should be no problem. In any case, the low humidity was never confirmed at our house but just assumed to be a factor.

The timing of the floor preparation at the factory is suspect in my opinion. We were told that there was a three months wait for the floor to be delivered since the raw material was not available. One week after, we were told that they suddenly did have enough floor to deliver to us for the entire house. They production process alone should take over two weeks. I believe that these floors were not adequately processed due to the short delivery time and that is why we have so many cracks and very poor urethane adhesion and protection of the wood.

I do not believe that the warranty on these very expensive floors has ever been successfully challenged from conversations with the salesmen. It appears that the homeowner has always been blamed when it comes to trouble with the floors and no claim has been paid.

I have contacted the BBB to try to deal with this situation but have had no response from Vintage Flooring to date. The Dealer "the Home Show" no longer promotes the Vintage flooring, but they are not taking any responsibility for the handling of my concerns.

To top it off, the company has "updated" their warranty to be more restricted and noted that all products will be reviewed under this warranty regardless of when the floor was purchased. Yes, this was done without disclosure to us who had out in a claim prior to the effective date of the Warranty.

I would ask you seriously reconsider purchasing from a Vintage and save yourself a lot of heartache.