“The Sound of a Car Door Opening in Front of You is Similar to the Sound of a Gun Being Cocked”– Amy Webster

We got a call last week (April 11, 2016) to say that the kitchen was being shipped from Winnipeg – yeah the new kitchen will be in shortly.

Of course that balloon was burst pretty quickly. Our kitchen is very small and the installers had scheduled for two days to install. One day for ripping out the floor and cabinets and laying the new floor and the second day for installation of cabinets. It didn’t quite work out that way.

“Best Laid Plans . . . .” The job was due to start on Monday April 18. We had to clear everything out of the \”tiny Kitchen into the tiny condo\”!

The floor tile guy didn’t show up until 10:00 am, went for a two hour lunch at 11:30 and left at 4:30. The kitchen was empty, the front foyer tile was laid but no grouting.

He came back on Tuesday and same deal late arriving and long lunch, I thought Ralf was going to lose it when he said he needed to come back on Wednesday to grout. Both of us were working on Wednesday. He came in at 7:00 a.m. to finish the grouting!!

The delivery guys for the cabinets could not deliver the cabinets until Thursday April 21, no worries the cabinet installers were rescheduled for Friday. The installers arrived on Friday and discovered that not all the pieces had been delivered and they could not install the kitchen without these two important pieces.

Ralf (not Lowes) arranged for the remaining pieces to be delivered on Saturday. Two o’clock came and went and no extra pieces. I would not have liked to have been on the other end of the phone when Ralf was calling the delivery company to find out where they were!! They had to make a second trip to Barrie, because they had forgotten to put our extra pieces on the first truck.

Installers returned on Monday to install the cabinets. They had to have the install done by Tuesday lunchtime as the counter top was being measured at 1:00.

Of course, because of the mistake with the deliveries they were now rescheduling other work to fit us in. It was very obvious that we were not happy customers and so they rescheduled their work.

Other fun problems! The cabinets had a plastic cover on them as they are European style high gloss cabinets. The installers hadn’t realized that the sides were covered in plastic and now we have pieces of plastic showing on some of the cabinets that have already been installed, we had to get an exacto knife to cut it level. Fortunately the counter tops will hide the plastic.

The sink cabinet was supposed to have a flip drawer for small items, that was not sent! We have two ‘fake’ drawer fronts.

The install of the microwave was supposed to include installing an outlet, the installers were not qualified electricians and needed to send another guy to do that.

The dishwasher didn’t fit in the space it came out of. For some strange reason the dishwasher grew and is now too tall for the space!

The installers had left two shelves in two of the cupboards and we couldn’t remove them, because of the door hinge and the screws attaching the cabinet to the wall. They had to remove the cabinet so that they could remove the shelves.

After the measure of the counter top it was supposed to take two to three weeks to be delivered. I knew it would take three weeks and penciled that date on the calendar (May 20, 2016). That date coincided with the Victoria Day long week-end. Ralf called Lowes on the Thursday to see if it was anywhere close to being ready. Once again he received no satisfaction from Lowes and called the company who was making the counter top directly. They were very helpful and informed him they were doing the final quality control and arranged with Ralf for delivery and install. Four weeks after the measure we received our new counter top.

The kitchen looks lovely, but we will never use Lowes again as the \”project managers\”. We have opted to use a different contractor for the back-splash, who has done work for us before.  I wish he had been available to do our kitchen.

The funny thing was that I work with a young man at the Greenhouse, whose parents were also redoing their kitchen at the same time – and I mean a major renovation – walls removed etc. Their kitchen was completed in the same amount of time as our tiny galley kitchen!!