Hi there. I recently bought a bundle appliance deal from Home Depot and for the most part, everything went smooth except the dishwasher install. The dishwasher that was delivered was defective but the install team left it plugged up and said they would come back out with a working dishwasher. They removed my old dishwasher and I paid $50 for that haul-a-way service. When the second crew came, they brought the wrong color dishwasher. They also said the first crew should have just given us back our original dishwasher rather than leaving us with the defective one. This team then proceeded to take both the defective dishwasher and the wrong color dishwasher with them, leaving us with nothing.
The next day, the area where the dishwasher was supposed to go had some flooding. We took the steps of cleaning it, getting a plumber out, and water mitigation. I sent over all of the documents to their claims agency, Sedgewick.
Now, the claims representative is only offering to pay us for the reimbursement of the plumber. Mind you, I had to get my whole floor removed due to water damage. My floor was engineered hardwood and had minor damage from the previous homeowner. We were aware of that and never tried to hide it, however, there was a big difference of our previous damage to what the installers caused by removing the dishwasher and not capping/clamping off things they left open with the plumbing.
The claims representative keeps saying the same thing over and over like a broken record player. She keeps saying because we had pre-existing damage they are not offering to cover it. My response to that was that it doesn’t matter that we had minor damage prior to that. It was never damaged enough for us to want to replace the floor or remove it. The minor damage we had was a little bit of lifting of the floor, but the installers had peeled some of our wood off when they removed the dishwasher, then the water made it so much worse. We were forced to remove it due to the flooding in order for water mitigation to do their job. Is there any advice or experience anyone can offer us? I don’t think this sounds right. It’s like having a dent on your car and then someone wrecks into you, causing you to fix the entire door but that person won’t take liability because you already had a dent. This feels so criminal.
Is there any way to fight this?
How can I get my claim taken seriously?
byu/crazycaked inInsurance
Posted by crazycaked
1 Comment
Your second to last sentence does happen, it’s called betterment. It’s not that they don’t take liability, they just only pay what they owe.
How old was the flooring? Any idea on the quality of it or the finish? The preexisting damage does matter. You could live with the preexisting damage, because who wants to drop an average of $10/sq foot if it’s not necessary (I don’t blame you). That doesn’t mean they owe for it either. You already had damaged boards. They damaged them more, ok, but what’s that worth? Not much when you factor in depreciation. If you had caused the damage to the boards, would you live with it or replace it?