Property Damage/Escalating to trading standards

I ordered my carpets and vinyl through CarpetWrong. They provided a 'fitting service' - notice my use of inverted commas there...

It's been 3 months and 20 days of intermittent waiting and trying to chase up CarpetWrong into fixing the damage they caused my house. I have easily put 10 hours of writing into this process (though much more time into waiting etc), CarpetWrong have barely even given my valid complaint 10 minutes.

The carpet fitters annihilated my skirting board.

The vinyl of faux wood panels was fitted fully diagonally because the job was too rushed.

The surveyor who advised me on the vinyl got key features wrong - like the amount of bars I needed between rooms, and the amount of prep work I needed to do myself to prepare for Vinyl.

The vinyl fitter nearly flat out refused to fit my vinyl because the surface wasn't even enough - something the surveyor had advised me was fine and I had followed their instructions to a T. My fitter spent an age on the phone to CarpetWrong who insisted it was all my fault. I literally had to beg the fitter to lay down the vinyl (not like I could afford other alternatives at this point), I was so grateful they eventually caved that I initially didn't take up a complaint about the diagonal vinyl. But it's pretty stressful to keep seeing diagonal floor boards in an otherwise well decorated flat.

I started the complaints process on November 1st (straight after my carpet fitting). I was messed around as to which store I was expected to email (I placed my order through Portsmouth, but Fareham store arranged the fitters).

The Fareham store bothered to provide me with prompt responses, the Portsmouth store never responded at all to my first email. I chased them up 24 days later and they made a load of excuses for their unprofessionalism. I also was promised many follow up phone calls that never happened.

They also massive downplayed the damage they'd done to my skirting boards and made me feel like I was overreacting - I have literal chunks missing from parts of my skirting board. It's not superficial damage whatsoever and they'd have understood that if they had actually turned up as they were meant to.

I shouldn't have even had to chase this up - it was abundantly obvious to the fitters seeing as they had full sight. They also damaged my wall (which was newly painted but left 1 month to dry fully) but I at least managed to fix this enough myself.

As a paying customer the excuses did nothing to help me - they just gave me even more of an understanding of the level of unprofessionalism. What I gather is the company doesn't employ enough people - no doubt because of a super greedy CEO that wants extra skiing holidays etc and that's bad and worthy of complaints but saying how overworked you are is not a valid response to someone whose house you've trashed. No sorry buts, just sorry and actually rectifying the problem.

After a substantial amount of waiting for nothing to get done I placed a scathing 1 star review on Trustpilot (as I had already informed CarpetWrong of my intention to do this and even escalate to trading standards).

CarpetWrong's response on Trustpilot was to flag my review as 'fake' to Trustpilot, and burden me with proving the issue to Trustpilot. It was a disgusting response on their part, had they responded well I'd have taken my review down but that made me even more determined to keep it up.

It's now 21st February and I was promised that the fitter would fix the skirting board, add the silver bar, and check the vinyl was fitted correctly (it's diagonal and covered in clumps of glue that collect dust so it very clearly isn't).

I only found out through phoning the store yesterday the fitter had no intention of showing up and they'd insisted he would phone me first thing today. So I've been stuck in my house for 48 hours trying to wait in just in case (because it was too dark to leave the house after).

I'm escalating my complaint to trading standards now, I've sent them an email that makes it very clear that I will take them to small court if they don't finally listen.

So I encourage you to never use this 'service.' Ever.