Soaked Loft
An Open Letter From Bob Stratton:
“Don’t Let a Cheap Washer Hose Wreck Your Life.”
Hi Steve,
It was great talking to you on the phone yesterday. Its a pleasure to talk to someone who takes such obvious pride in the workmanship and quality of his product! Please feel free to use this sad tale of woe however you like. I hope at least we can educate people so they do not go through what we did.
The story starts with a 2 year gut renovation of an old factory building in Brooklyn. We did a very high-end modern renovation with (among other things) a beautiful custom kitchen and cork floors. We have the washing machine and dryer on the second floor, where the bedrooms are. We changed the original position of the appliances to make them easier to access.
The hoses that came with the washer were a bit short, so I went to the hardware store and bought some longer hoses. I wasn't intending to save money by buying a cheap hose or anything, it just never occurred to me to that there were different quality hoses. It wasn’t an item that I thought needed to be researched. I just thought, "A hose is a hose is a hose." Big mistake!!
I certainly paid very close attention to materials and quality in many other aspects of my house, which, if I do say so myself, was beautifully designed and painstakingly crafted. I would have certainly spent extra money on a good hose if it had ever occurred to me (or someone told me) how important this was.
In any case, my family went away for a long weekend and returned to find water 4 inches deep on both floors, cascading down the stairs and over the atrium opening to the first floor and pouring through the ceiling of the first floor in dozens of different places.
The washing machine hose we had bought burst in the middle while we were gone and had been gushing water out onto the second floor of our house for 3 days straight.
Not only was our custom kitchen (See pictures) completely ruined, but both floors of cork and the walls and ceiling of the first floor had to be completely torn out.
Pretty much all of our furniture had to go straight into a dumpster. Fortunately, we were insured by Chubb, and were put up in temporary housing during the restoration. It was a painstaking process as we had to almost rebuild from scratch. We finally moved back in after 6 months.
My first order of business was to find the best washing machine hoses available at any price. With the help of Google, I found Floodchek. Had I only known of your product! Floodchek would have prevented the miserable disruption of our lives and $475,000 in property damage. Get the word out, Steve.
Soggy in Brooklyn,
Bob Stratton
