Milners Reviews 2

Just had my office carpet laid , it's perfect looks and feels amazing. The fitters were professional and polite.

Last year we invested in a solid oak floor for our dining room.

It was a top of the range German oak floor. I will skip the part about the floor going missing and the ensuing delays to bring to your attention the damage caused by the floor.

The floor was delivered and left in its packaging the day before installation, I was sure that there should have been some kind of acclimatisation but Milners insist that they followed the manufacturers instructions.

The floor was fitted the following day and looked perfect, it stayed perfect for a couple of weeks, and then we had a bulge in the floor, the scotia started to ping off, the skirting started to mis shape, and worst of all, the radiator pipes started to leak.

In case you hadn't guessed, the floor was expanding, way passed the expansion space left by the fitter.

The edge was trimmed by Milners, no accountability for the now damaged skirting or leaking radiator pipes, that was rectified at my cost.
Milners told me you - must have a damp problem, we had a building surveyor check out the room, no problem found.

As a precaution we had extra air vents installed under the floor, at a cost of £250.

Milners suggested our shower could be leaking when the other end of our dining room started to expand rapidly, it wasn't, " maybe there's a pipe buried somewhere" , "maybe your house is too humid", " maybe you should invest in a dehumidifier" . Foolishly, we did. £350 later and the floor no longer expanding we seemed to have solved the problem. Our silly house was too humid for the floor,

Winter came, and gaps start to appear between the planks. The floor is drying out with the central heating.

6 months after the initial installation Milners ask a technitian from the floor manufacturers to have a look at our problem, at the time we had no idea he was a sales rep!

He had a humidity meter, by this time so did I, and so did the building surveyor, and so did the floor layer, no one could find a damp issue. But amazingly the technician/sales rep did, with that he disappeared and Milners sent me a letter informing me that in view of our damp problems (we still can't find a damp problem) it's our own fault that the floor was still expanding.

They gave me a few suggestions to keep the room at a constant 21 degrees Celsius throughout the year and maybe invest in some insulation! No one mentioned this at the sales process.

Problem was by this stage the floor was constricting not expanding, from then on everything fell on deaf ears, wasn't their problem. Amazingly the floor never has expanded again, probably because it acclimatised.

We had a look at going through the ombudsman to claim back the damage caused by the over expanding floor but it was going to cost £500 to have an expert do a full report more than the cost of the damage caused by the floor.

A lot of floor companies no longer sell natural oak flooring, it is potentially damaging to a property, needs to be housed within a specific climactic range, engineered wooden floor is by far the safer option. If Milners had explained this at the sales process we would have purchased an engineered floor from them.

In conclusion the floor expanded due to never being acclimatised, if Milners had advised us of this in the first place instead of blaming the house it would have saved a lot of expense and pointless investigation on our part.

we have no damp problem, leak or lack of insulation, or dodgy old pipe buried under the ground,we do have a dehumidifier which we no longer use, and a bitter taste in the mouth.