Banchero Hardwood Floors

Nick let me down. Disappeared. Vanished. Poof! Although I wouldn’t wish this on anyone, I’d like to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume something very, very bad happened in his life that could reasonably account for this behavior… but who knows? I haven’t a clue…
Here’s the story in a nutshell: I interviewed a number of flooring contractors for my project, and my intuition told me to go with Nick. He gave me a lot of his time when he came over to assess the project. He seemed to understand what I wanted and made some smart-​sounding suggestions. His estimate did need a few edits for clarification, and he did make the revisions.
Even though Nick was difficult to get on the phone and kept me waiting for days before returning calls and emails, I decided to go with him, because (I thought) I had good rapport with him, and his estimate was competitive… and I had seen some of his previous work in person, which looked pretty good to me. Even though he was lax about communicating promptly, whenever I did get Nick on the phone he apologized profusely and always had a reasonable alibi.
That’s the good. The bad is that I left Nick a message saying I would be pleased to hire him and was ready to give a 50% deposit via credit card. That I wanted to book the time slot we had discussed, since it was VERY important to me to get this project done BEFORE I had to move furniture, etc. into the space. A day or so went by and I called again, leaving a message to the effect «Here I am, waiting by the phone! Credit card in hand! Deposit all ready for you!» No response. I emailed the same… no response. I emailed and called him again. Nothing. Finally I had to find another contractor and emailed Nick that after waiting a week for him to get back to me, I had to assume he had decided he wasn’t interested in my project after all. I wished him well. Nick, I sincerely hope you didn’t get into a car wreck or something… if you did, I’ll feel mighty bad about this review.
But I have to add that I had been warned by a previous customer: «Nick does good work, but he’s not great about getting back to you. Not great? Totally, mysteriously a zero.

Our old fir floors turned out beautifully. You’d never know they were 90 years old. Everyone who worked on the project was pleasant and professional, and the quality of the work was first rate. We did have trouble at times getting ahold of Nick, but he always got the work done when it needed to be done and we could not be happier with the results.