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Now that we finally moved into the new home and we’re close to getting back to normal, it’s time to summarize what went right, what went wrong and what was an absolute disaster.

The Good:
We were pleasantly surprised about the Delancey Street Movers of Santa Fe. When we were ready to pick a moving company, we asked several local companies to come out to our house and give us a bid. Delancey Street Movers provided the cheapest bid and that was one of the reasons why we picked them. Funny enough, when one of the other companies who placed a bid heard about our decision to go with Delancey, they called and told us that we were dealing with ex-inmates, ex-drug users and crooks in general. This unprofessional behaviour made us even more aware that we had picked the right company. The Delancey Street Foundation provides a social safety net for those who have previously done something wrong in their lifes. Yes, all of the guys who moved us were ex-inmates, but all of them were really nice and hard working. They deserve a chance and we’re happy that we were able to support them.

For all plumbing, heating work we always turn to Glenn’s Plumbing of Santa Fe. He’s nothing short of a Saint. This guy is incredibly busy, but he still managed to come out several times to inspect our new home and make some time to do some repair work when we needed him. It’s almost stupid to mention his name here, because that probably means it’ll become even more difficult to get on his busy schedule, but he sure deserves the recognition.

We were also delighted with our real estate agent Liz Sheffield from French & French. We hired Liz as our selling agent when we decided to switch agents about a year ago. Liz has a lot of attention to detail and is extremely pleasant to deal with. We never felt that any of our questions and/or concerns were left unanswered. She made every effort to keep us informed about the selling and buying process. There were days when I talked to her more often than to my wife. We are so glad that Liz did not only act as our selling agent, but also guided us in the buying process with our new home. I’m just sad that we won’t be using her anytime soon

The Bad:
I was a tad disappointed about The Candyman in Santa Fe. They had wired our old home and had a good job for our home theater. So I thought I use them again for the new home. We needed some internal and external speakers, volume controls and a home theater wired. After some initial meetings and discussions, my contact at The Candyman suddenly became unreachable. I left a number of messages, but never heard back from him. I guess The Candyman didn’t want our money.

The Ugly:
There’s no doubt who deserves the top spot in The Ugly category: Steamatic of Albuquerque. We had a small mold problem in our new home. A few water leaks were undetected for a prolonged period, mold developed and the previous owner of the home agreed to have those areas professionally cleaned. We had CERL (Environmental Consultants) determine the extent of the mold infestation and develop a plan to get rid of it. CERL has a list of approved remediation companies and Steamatic happens to be one of the companies on this list. I’m now under the firm impression that CERL should reevaluate whether Steamtic should still be on that list.

We had everything: broken appointments, no shows for appointments, late shows for appointments and even lying about communication that supposedly happened. To top everything off, they did a crappy job, showed up four times to clean a small area and everytime CERL checked the spore-levels after they cleaned the area, the result was still way too high. When we finally had enough and hired another company to clean the affected area, the inspector from the new company pointed out several things that were highly unprofessional in the work that Steamatic had performed. Their non-performance caused major delays in our move and made it impossible for me to move into my new home office. As an indirect result I had to take off an extra week from work.

Steamatic is a national company with franchises all over the country. I can not speak for all the businesses that run under the Steamatic name, but I’m absolutely damned sure that I will avoid them like the plague from now on. If you ever run into a situation where you need services from a company like Steamatic and you live in the Santa Fe/Albuquerque area, do yourself a favour and avoid them as well.