Complaints

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• Initial Complaint

  Date:07/03/2023

  Type:Service or Repair Issues
  Status:

  AnsweredMore info

  Complaint statuses

  Resolved:

  The complainant verified the issue was resolved to their satisfaction.

  Unresolved:

  The business responded to the dispute but failed to make a good faith effort to resolve it.

  Answered:

  The business addressed the issues within the complaint, but the consumer either a) did not accept the response, OR b) did not notify BBB as to their satisfaction.

  Unanswered:

  The business failed to respond to the dispute.

  Unpursuable:

  BBB is unable to locate the business.

  I hired Exact Match (and paid them more than $25,000) to stain the natural stone on my house on the reliance of their website and verbal representations (namely, that the stain would last at least 30 years and that I would have a warranty for that). It failed in approximately 3 years. I provided them with many pictures, allowed them to visually inspect and even offered to let them use my house as a test panel so they could figure out how to make it better. They have offered no help whatsoever at fixing it or even removing the remnants of the stain that is in different stages of failing all over the house. They have taken the position that I do not have a warranty because I did not "request" a warranty. They continue to claim a 100% success rate for projects in their marketing. They use my house in their marketing (********************************************************************-******************************************). They have known for approximately 2 years that the stain on my house has failed. They refuse to do anything at all about it.

  

  Business Response

  Date: 08/17/2023

  July 31, 2023 

  We completed your project in 2018 when you signed an approval, indicating that you were completely satisfied and were given use and care instructions within the same sign off. In
  addition to that, you were verbally given use and care instructions which you were also walked through at the end of the project as part of our standard process. You were offered an
  opportunity to receive a Limited Warranty which is time-sensitive to request, but you elected not to apply for it. We did not hear from you for years. When we did hear from you, you explained that you were seeing a small area of work wherein there was some visible change to an area that we worked on which you wanted to review with us and get our thoughts and suggestions about it. In addition to returning your call via our staff member the same day, we emailed and requested photos as well. When we asked you to produce the Limited Warranty letter, which we wanted to review with you, as it further outlines the use and care instructions and warranty claim process, you indicated that you did not have or maintain any warranty paperwork.

  Nonetheless, we still responded within about a week in person as a courtesy, sending you our VP Field Operations who is the very same expert who performed the work for you. Upon arrival, you explained that you were now quite suddenly unhappy with the entire home's look and claimed widespread changes were taking place and insisted that you had no idea why. We inspected the exterior with you and our expert discovered that any changes you were seeing were a result of damage that is indicative of destructive maintenance. As a matter of our due process, we asked you how you've been maintaining the home so that we could advise you or make adjustments to the practice you were using, even though you did not apply for the offered Limited Warranty on the project. Clearly, no visible organic matter whatsoever was left on the exterior following the thorough cleaning that it had been given. We checked windows, stone, trim, and every surface that we saw and found the home to be quite clean. In the Northeast, this is just not physically possible to happen without thorough cleaning, especially at the end of a typical summer. Just in a matter of a month, cobwebs, soil and dirt will accumulate on any home in this region. The timing of your call, and the explanation that your dissatisfaction and the change you saw was widespread when you called us indicates that a destructive maintenance of some kind took place very recently prior to your phone call. While I am sure that this would be frustrating for anyone to realize that they have damaged their completed work in some way, this is not a covered item under any warranty, even had you applied for the Limited Warranty, which was made available to you at no cost for the first 30 days following the project, which you 
  rejected. Regardless, as discussed in the past, and in order to not void a Limited Warranty, if applicable, at the first sign of any maintenance causing issues, one must agree to report the situation right away for guidance so that use and care practices can be changed immediately, so that the damage does not become a widespread problem to address. We were told that it was a small area to review, but you changed the story upon our arrival to show us the whole home was an issue in your eyes. I know that our phone and email records show that we were not consulted further about how to maintain the home, assuming you had questions along the way at all. Use and Care instructions you signed for were very clear, but clearly not followed per the evidence we found, and it seems the destructive maintenance likely occurred over a period of three years, finally causing what you would say are "widespread changes" in the third year.

  The fact that the products are ASTM Lab tested by an independent, certified lab prove that our system will endure under the harshest conditions possible for UV and Freeze Thaw found anywhere in North America for a period of at least 30 years, but more to the point of 50 years and beyond, we have explained that sudden, spontaneous widespread failure is not scientifically possible, or something that ever happens. If this change is happening, there is always a catalyst or cause. Despite our requests for information to determine the cause, unfortunately, we have not been able to make a recommendation for you since you are unwilling to share the details of how the home was cleaned and what you or your hired party were using to clean any part of the home where cleaners or chemicals or pressure wash of any kind could have affected the completed work. We did explain, after many discussions back and forth, that we can see signs of widespread destructive maintenance, as areas which did not even receive any exposure from sun or weather or any outside factor in three years, you said were showing changes that you felt were a problem. We cannot make a recommendation unless we have the facts about what took place. We do ask that homeowners disclose any pre-existing chemicals, including sealants and more so that we can determine if the project is a good fit. Since you indicated that there was nothing on the stone and we could proceed to provide service, the only thing we can determine is that the method you used to keep your home so visibly clean caused any changes that you now deem unacceptable. 

  Limited Warranties such as the one you elected not to apply for are offered on a case by case basis because we believe so strongly in our product's high quality, backed by decades of research and field testing and millions of square feet which do not fade or change around the USA, Coast to Coast. If that is not enough, the ASTM independent lab testing assures us and our clients that the product does not spontaneously fade or change, as it is manufactured with a formulation to endure these conditions. This is not to say that the color of any completed project or any masonry cannot be damaged by improper use and care, of course it can happen. Even masonry, stone or brick that has never been stained professionally can easily be damaged by improper maintenance, and we often color correct those situations where strong chemicals, left on too long or at too high of a concentration, or even plain  water put under pressure that was too strong for the stone or masonry has caused damage to the appearance. We correct those situations with 100 percent success regularly as well.

  We have explained to you repeatedly that we’d be able to make a recommendation for you if you would be willing to disclose what catalyst was involved to suddenly cause a
  widespread change that you say you see on your home, and what happened, and how often it happened and with what this happened. We are not certain, as we explained, that your home is a good candidate for additional service involving professional staining since clearly, something has happened to damage the completed work since we left and whatever caused the damage will very likely continue to happen. While you would like a refund, your sign off indicates that you felt the work was complete, you were thrilled with the results and wanted no more, you agreed to use and care and sent us away receiving the benefit of the full project. This does not warrant a refund for the project you received in full per the contract.

  In addition to requesting a refund for the project you received in full and were completely thrilled with, you are now also asking us to re-stain the entire home again following the damage that took place to our completed work since we left, and you want us to perform this work at no cost to you. This would be tantamount to theft of work to provide a refund for the first completed project. This would be a second theft of work to provide you with the second project again which you request, and at no cost, and at this writing, due to the damage which has taken place, we don't even know if your home is a suitable candidate now for more staining as you indicated that it was originally upon hiring us.
  Since you will not disclose the facts so that we can make a recommendation for your consideration, we are unable to assist you further, which is precisely what we have explained in
  all of our prior communications. If you did not like the way our lab-tested pro stain performed after the destructive maintenance was done to the home, and you wish to continue with the same maintenance practices, you are always welcome to find another system, product or other solution that you would like better and have that applied to your home instead. We simply directed you to use a garden hose for cleaning and no chemicals if you need to rinse organic matter off your home, as most homeowners find that this is more than sufficient and has no risk of damage associated whatsoever. 

  President and Managing Member
  Exact Match Masonry Staining LLC

  Customer Answer

  Date: 08/17/2023

  [To assist us in bringing this matter to a close, you must give us a reason why you are rejecting the response. If no reason is received your complaint will be closed as Answered]
  
  
  
   Complaint: ********
  
  
  
  I am rejecting this response because:
  

  In addition to being insulting, the response from the
  business is largely irrelevant, illogical and non-sensical. Yes, the day the
  project was completed, I was completely satisfied. That is not the issue here.
  I was never verbally notified of the steps to jump through to receive a Limited
  Warranty and I never “rejected” a Warranty. Despite our repeated discussions in
  advance about the warranty, I only discovered 3 years after the job that there
  was a clause requiring me to “request” a warranty in a tiny footnote of a
  document I thought was merely an electronic receipt. More importantly, Exact
  Match has illogically continued to accuse me of applying some mystery agent
  with “destructive maintenance” and then insultingly suggested I am lying about
  it.

  But the reality is that we have never done any maintenance
  on the exterior of house. Never. Not on the windows, not on the stone, not on
  mortar, not on the gutters and not on the roof. The house is stone and that is
  exactly why people pay a premium for stone – it is a maintenance-free product.
  In fact, when ******* **** came to the house I showed him how the patio pavers
  nearest to the stone remained extremely dirty while the center of our travertine
  patio was clean because I had promised him when he first stained that I would
  never powerwash the stones and I did not want the powerwasher to even get *close*
  to the stone. The only thing that has ever touched our stone is
  sunlight, snow and rain. And the stain is failing everywhere, even in places
  under covered patios that do not receive direct sunlight (nor rain nor snow).
  
  Additionally, Exact Match expresses some sort of shock that
  it took me three years to reach out to them. If you look at the before and
  after pictures of our house (**************************************************************************************************************/), you will see that it was a very artistic process
  designed to look natural. Making the stone look natural, by definition, requires
  a lot of variation. In fact, only 50-60% of the stones were stained in the first place. I would strongly suspect the stain started failing well before when we reached out to them, but we simply did not notice it. I do not think the
  widespread change was “sudden, spontaneaous” but I have no proof of that fact
  because I did not take monthly pictures of the same exact patch of stone on my house.
  When you have thousands of stones on a house colored in several different
  colors (grays, blacks, browns, etc), having the stain start to vanish from even
  100 of them is literally impossible to notice unless you are looking for it and I had no reason to look for it. In the initial stages of failing,
  from a distance, everything looks “natural” and fine. Once it reached a
  critical tipping point, however, we started examining the stones more closely
  and we could easily tell something was happening to the stain. Again, I suspect
  it started happening almost immediately after they finished and it just took
  time for us to realize it.
  
  That is when we naively reached out Exact Match. They
  responded by telling us we had no warranty (which we found shocking) and they
  continue to take the stance that even if we had one we would have voided it by
  maintenance (even though we never did any maintenance of any kind). They are in
  possession of all the facts on the case, but rather than acknowledge that they
  did a bad job, they continue to claim we are withholding information. The reality
  is they are the ones hiding information. I gave them unfettered access to my
  house and practically begged them to do test panels to figure out how to make
  the stain last longer. Meanwhile, why do they refuse to send us a spec sheet of
  the actual material? Why do they refuse to send us the actual lab report they claim
  to have on their stain? Why do they claim we “rejected” a Warranty when they
  purposely obscured the process for getting it? Even when we followed up after
  the job was finished to give them positive feedback about how it looked, they
  did not tell us about the warranty. I would love to know what percentage of
  jobs they do for homeowners actually have a warranty, but I am sure that is yet
  another thing they will not reveal. In any event, it would not matter since they will claim that any job that fails is the customer’s fault (even in
  the absence of any proof).
  
  They hide behind an illogical and insulting excuse. They
  have accused us of lying about doing “destructive maintenance” and they have
  insulted our intelligence repeatedly. The ordeal of not knowing what has
  happened to the stone on our house has cost us countless sleepless night and
  endless stress about how about to fix it. I have been quite fortunate in life. Trust
  me when I say I *wish* I had caused this stain failure because then I
  would have a simple solution – just pay them to do it again. However, I am not
  willing to pay them again to do a job that they evidently cannot do. They claim
  it is “theft of work” to provide a refund for a completed project, without
  mentioning that the project was not completed as promised (it was supposed to
  last 30 years). I think taking money for a job done improperly is “theft of
  money.” A solution to that would be to complete the job as initially agreed and
  I initially suggested that because I gave them the benefit of the doubt.
  Perhaps because I wanted to believe they knew what they were doing. But their
  response to this situation has let me know that I cannot allow them to touch my
  house again. As a result, I suggested they refund my money. But they have
  offered nothing other than the ridiculous suggestion that I caused the stain
  failure and am withholding information from them.
  

  Regards,
  
  
  
  ***** ***********