Buyer beware and stay away from Golden Bear Floors (owned by a man named John Bernal). Not only did his installers do a terrible job on our floor, but at every step of the process, he did exactly what we told him NOT to do. I told him not to cut the baseboards to fit in the AC registers. He did anyway. I told him not to caulk our stone fireplace against the floor. Again, he did it anyway. He's a great salesman and seems very trustworthy, but as soon as he gets his money he is impossible to get ahold of. After the installation was "complete" we found many areas where his crew made mistakes, including dropping dabs of epoxy glue in many places on the floor, hundreds of nail holes left unfilled with putty, wavy floors and damaged, dented boards from his workers dropping equipment on it (which he also never fixed). We also didn't notice at first, but the refrigerator was left 3 inches out of it's built-in cabinet. When we told him we were unhappy about it he said that's the way it was. Yeah, right. When we pushed the fridge back in, we found that the wood flooring didn't even go to the edge of the fridge, now you can see unfinished floor underneath it! Not only that, but now our fridge wobbles every time you close the door, and the cabinet isn't back in place. His guys couldn't even line up the baseboards to match our stair descent, and it still isn't fixed, 5 weeks later (none of this is fixed - see pic below).

While he was selling us his service, he mentioned how "perfect" everything would be once complete. Well, it's far from perfect, believe me. He even gave us this BS story about how his buddy worked at the place we were buying wood from, and that we'd get the "friend price" of $8/sq foot. My other contractor called for the same quote and they said it could be had for as low as $7.50 to anyone! Lies, lies, and more lies. And sub-standard work. That's what you will get with Golden Bear Hardwood in the Bay Area, CA.

I thought his provided reference sheet of past customers would be useful, and I called some of them. These people must be the jobs he didn't mess up on, because they all said he did a decent job. So you can't trust references you don't know. Lesson learned.

In fact, he had to fire one of his workers mid-job because he was doing such a bad job! The replacement worker he brought in had his wife come along, and hang out in our backyard at the pool, using a towel she found in our house! That's just disrespectful and very unprofessional.

We considered trying to keep calling him to fix the floor issues, but he doesn't answer calls, and if he returns a call it's a week later and won't commit to a time to come by. So we've decided he's not allowed in our house again - we don't want his incompetent workers anywhere near our house again. Who knows what it's going to cost me to fix his mess. I'm also going to be contacting the BBB and any other agency where I can lodge a complaint. There are so many issues I can't even list them all here.

Save yourself time and hassle - only go with someone recommended by a friend or someone you trust. At this point my only recourse is to contact my attorney. Please don't make the mistake I did - use someone else and save yourself the headache and disappointment. I put up a couple of pictures so that you can see the kind of job he does.