Domestic cleaning company refusing to pay for damage to our carpet

midsummer100

BikingBud said:

A lot about your precious carpet, how's your dog and why were you leaving pens where they could chew them?

Or did you not leave explicit step by step instructions for your dog? And advise it to ring you straight away, sorry no what's app you straight away if there were any issues.

Seems like a mismatch in expectations and a cleaner trying their hardest to keep you happy.

Use your own household insurance, after all your dog was the origin of the problem.

 

Errr no. The ink is in fact irrelevant. You are missing the point. The cleaner has admitted it, the cleaning company have admitted it, but the cleaning company say it's not covered under their insurance. They say if a cleaner is in the process of cleaning then it's not covered, which rather negates them paying any premiums or having insurance.

I'll ignore your attempt at humour regarding our gorgeous pooch. 

BikingBud

I'm just not sure:

4th week. A couple of days before we were going away. The day we went away our pooch decided to eat a pen in the lounge. 🤦 There were small bits of black ink on the carpet by the time I found her. We Googled and a good carpet technician will be able to remove ink easily. We have a good carpet technician who is part of the family owned carpet business we bought the carpet from.

Just doesn't add up.

Dog caused problem.

Ink on carpet is problem, your precious carpet, that you didn't warn the cleaner about.

You didn't explain to the cleaner despite seeming to be punctilious in setting other instructions, why?

You have not commented upon the dog's health or welfare being, why?

Section62

midsummer100 said:

Grenage said:

midsummer100 said:

Thirdly, cleaning won't remove bleach. Once something has been bleached you can't put colour back in. 

Worth mentioning that this isn't true.  It's tricky, but it's possible.

How is it true with a carpet that's been dyed as a large sheet of carpet,! 

Anyway. Moving on...

The point is, if you get anywhere near court with a claim against the cleaning company, the judge is not going to 'move on'.  They will want to understand why you are claiming the cost of replacing the carpet entirely, rather than trying one of the possible repair methods you've dismissed.  You'll be asked to explain why you've gone with the most expensive option, because it is a fairly fundamental point of law that you have to mitigate your losses rather than expecting the other party to pick up whatever bill you decide to present them.

If the cleaning company's insurers do get involved then don't expect them to buckle straight away.  There's probably enough on both sides here for the insurers to have a good chance of defending a claim. Or at the very least limiting their liability to the cost of a reasonable repair.

If this was something more clear cut and one-sided, like the cleaner spilt a bottle of bleach on the carpet, then the cleaning company would be stuffed.  But the ultimate cause of this issue was that you pet chewed a pen and got ink on the carpet, and you forgot to warn either the company or the cleaner that the ink was there and not to attempt any cleaning in that area themselves.

You've dismissed several points as irrelevant, but that isn't how the legal system works.  A court or arbitrator won't limit themselves to the one or two points you think are relevant - they will want a full understanding of what led to the incident and the role each party played in the outcome.

midsummer100 said:

...The issue is that the cleaning company fully admit responsibility however they claim their insurance won't cover it. You're kinda missing the point. 

There's lots of points being missed unfortunately.

Unless there's something you've not mentioned yet, the company admitting responsibility is in the form of a phone conversation?  So they could deny this, or claim the admission was made without them understanding the full sequence of events.  From what I understand you got the cleaner to admit what they had done in a series of text messages.  If I was advising them I think I'd probably suggest they only said what they said because they felt under pressure and intimidated.  I think they'd be able to justify that quite easily.

You've had advice from several forum members now, the emerging consensus seems to be that blame isn't exclusively on the shoulders of the cleaning company.  Instead of complaining about the quality of the advice forum members have freely given, it might be worth considering whether they have a point.

I say that because I fear if you go the route you are set on going you risk having a poor outcome if this ends up in court.  I've been involved in more than my fair share of legal disputes, and one of the things I've observed is that conduct has a disproportionate impact on outcome. Even an open-and-shut case can go horribly wrong if the claimant has conducted themselves poorly.  Start by talking to some other specialist carpet repairers and get advice on whether there could be a satisfactory solution which isn't as expensive as full replacement.  If there isn't, then get that in writing.  Then decide whether you'd be willing to accept some of the responsibility yourself, and adjust the claim downwards to reflect this.  Often people will make a payment to settle so long as they don't feel unfairly blamed - so explore with the cleaning company whether they would pay a more modest figure.

midsummer100

We will be using the legal team at our insurers to resolve this with the cleaning company. 

We've done absolutely nothing wrong other than employ a cleaning company in good faith and their employee has damaged our property, a fact which no-one, not the cleaner nor the cleaning company, dispute. 

The dispute is that the cleaning company claim to be fully insured and professional but they claim their insurance company won't cover the damage to our property.

I have all admissions on text messages and WhatsApp messages. Written messages, at my insistence. 

The issue is caused by the cleaner being dishonest. Had she made a phone call and asked as soon as she saw what she thought she'd done, we wouldn't be here now. But she didn't. She's dishonest, tried to cover up damage she thought she'd caused, then went home early without telling anyone. She admits this and so do the cleaning company.

Thank you for your feedback and taking time to comment. Most of the comments on here have simply helped me to understand how this has been misunderstood when we've done nothing wrong. My fault for not being clear in my writing. 

As an origin Money Saver, I know this used to be a helpful and supportive place. I watched it develop and considered working for Martin. I see it's now little more than a Facebook page of people being unkind and unhelpful. I've had to report several comments, which there was never a need for previously. 

Grenage

midsummer100 said:

Grenage said:

midsummer100 said:

Thirdly, cleaning won't remove bleach. Once something has been bleached you can't put colour back in. 

Worth mentioning that this isn't true.  It's tricky, but it's possible.

How is it true with a carpet that's been dyed as a large sheet of carpet,! 

Anyway. Moving on...

One can dye a small area, it just needs to be carefully matched.

35har1old

midsummer100 said:

We will be using the legal team at our insurers to resolve this with the cleaning company. 

We've done absolutely nothing wrong other than employ a cleaning company in good faith and their employee has damaged our property, a fact which no-one, not the cleaner nor the cleaning company, dispute. 

The dispute is that the cleaning company claim to be fully insured and professional but they claim their insurance company won't cover the damage to our property.

I have all admissions on text messages and WhatsApp messages. Written messages, at my insistence. 

The issue is caused by the cleaner being dishonest. Had she made a phone call and asked as soon as she saw what she thought she'd done, we wouldn't be here now. But she didn't. She's dishonest, tried to cover up damage she thought she'd caused, then went home early without telling anyone. She admits this and so do the cleaning company.

Thank you for your feedback and taking time to comment. Most of the comments on here have simply helped me to understand how this has been misunderstood when we've done nothing wrong. My fault for not being clear in my writing. 

As an origin Money Saver, I know this used to be a helpful and supportive place. I watched it develop and considered working for Martin. I see it's now little more than a Facebook page of people being unkind and unhelpful. I've had to report several comments, which there was never a need for previously. 

If I where you I wouldn't do anything until you got a legal decision on the amount of compensation payable 
Have you had the insurance company out to view?

Slinky

I'm not sure how all this 'original moneysaver' stuff is relevant, particularly since your profile says you joined in 2009. I've been a member since 2004 and never felt the need to waft that fact around as if it gives me some right to a better class of response.

Good luck with getting your issue sorted.

BikingBud

midsummer100 said:

We will be using the legal team at our insurers to resolve this with the cleaning company. 

We've done absolutely nothing wrong other than employ a cleaning company in good faith and their employee has damaged our property, a fact which no-one, not the cleaner nor the cleaning company, dispute. 

The dispute is that the cleaning company claim to be fully insured and professional but they claim their insurance company won't cover the damage to our property.

I have all admissions on text messages and WhatsApp messages. Written messages, at my insistence. 

The issue is caused by the cleaner being dishonest. Had she made a phone call and asked as soon as she saw what she thought she'd done, we wouldn't be here now. But she didn't. She's dishonest, tried to cover up damage she thought she'd caused, then went home early without telling anyone. She admits this and so do the cleaning company.

Thank you for your feedback and taking time to comment. Most of the comments on here have simply helped me to understand how this has been misunderstood when we've done nothing wrong. My fault for not being clear in my writing. 

As an origin Money Saver, I know this used to be a helpful and supportive place. I watched it develop and considered working for Martin. I see it's now little more than a Facebook page of people being unkind and unhelpful. I've had to report several comments, which there was never a need for previously. 

It is unfortunate that you feel people are being unkind.

There are a whole range of issues where you appear to not want to consider where members have offered advice, both in the origin of the problem, your dog chewing the pen, and the route to best restitution. 

The cleaning company being honest would not wind back the clock to before your dog chewed on the pen.

You paid the cleaner to clean, they thought they had spilt something so tried to clean it. If you had advised it was ink and required specialist cleaning:

1. The cleaner would have known it was not their fault and would not have tried to clean it.
2. The cleaner would have left it for you to sort according to any arrangement with the specialist cleaning company. 

We still don't know how it affected your dog! You are only concerned about your carpet.

I'm with @slinky and I've been here since 2003!

Still not sure that this isn't a spoof.

Best wishes!

mr_stripey

I'm sure the dog is fine people! My dogs have eaten/chewed all sorts of crap over the years, mostly without causing any harm!

WIAWSNB

Hi Midsummer.
As advised, Legal Protection is free to use, and will not affect your premiums; it's separate - and independent of - your actual insurance policy. 
See what they say; it could be to call on your own insurance policy, and let them pursue the cleaning co, or it could be to tackle the cleanco first, I don't know. Possibly both.
Definitely worth calling them up for advice and guidance - that is exactly what it's for. Make the task easier by briefly outlining the relevant facts of the situation in chrono order.
Leave out the 'emotive', and any 'speculation', especially on how you feel someone acted - stick to the known facts.
If correct, include that you didn't specify any special cleaning requirements, for example regarding this 'pure wool'(?) carpet. (I say that quite deliberately, since if you'd had, say, some gold leaf fittings, you'd presumably would have made it clear to the cleaning co. to not have them Jif'ed?).
Be sure to include that you called the specialist carpet cleaner following the accident, but did not call your 'general cleaning' outfit, who were due to visit. Also worth adding that you provide the cleaning products, of which this bleaching spray carpet cleaner was present.

Be sure to not make comments like, "...which were impossible to avoid", "dishonest", etc. for obvious reasons. At best, they are likely to cause a loss of sympathy (as you have detected on this thread). And details like, "my last cleaner was Ukrainian...", which is of zero relevance.

The complete facts will be very important to your LP, as they need to assess the likelihood of a successful claim; they will only consider acting if there's a greater than 50% chance of a good outcome. They will therefore not want to hear, at a later date, any counter-points from the cleaning co. that you failed to mention. 

You are clearly very house-proud - nothing wrong with that - and have high standards - nothing wrong with that - and high expectations - nothing wrong with that, provided you play your part too. And I think immediately informing the cleaning co to avoid the carpet should have been part of your associated responsibilities. Just consider all the expressions you have used against this employee, and see if they could similarly direct any towards your actions, or lack thereof (not that they are likely to). Seemingly it's ok for you to 'honestly forget' summat, and not accept any responsibility as a result. 
And, I suggest, if you did give enough cleaning details from the outset to include 'use only washing up liquid on the toilets', then why on earth didn't that include, 'on no account use any cleaners on the pure wool carpet - just inform me of any marks that don't come out with a vacuuming'?
Anyhoo, see what your LegProt says.