My Kitchen Is in My Garage

From Kitchen Cabinets, Upstate NY, Mani Niall's new book

Well, that's not exactly true. My new kitchen cabinets, sink, and range hood are in the garage. Waiting. What for? Not the contractor, surprisingly. He's eager to start.

When the new cabinets arrived two weeks ago, John and I found many inconsistencies, cracks, and other damage. So, a rep from the cabinet manufacturer came to see exactly what these unsatisfied customers were seeing for himself.

From Kitchen Cabinets, Upstate NY, Mani Niall's new book

John, the rep, and I spent a few hours in the garage as the sun set and darkness fell, examining the cabinets. Even the rep found a few issues we didn't spot during our looks at the cabinets. We were pretty disappointed, however, not entirely surprised either.

We had joined Direct Buy a few months ago, and ordered a few light fixtures right away. They took a long time to arrive, and when I went down to Edison to pick them up, I was very surprised and dismayed to see how damaged the lights were. It was if they had skipped quality control. I was only able to keep one of the three fixtures. So, I had Direct Buy send them back to the manufacturer. They did, and six weeks later when the second set arrived, they too were in poor shape. Scratched and generally pretty beat up. John had gone with me this time to see for himself. I'm glad he did.

So, when he and I opened up all the kitchen cabinets we had ordered from Direct Buy, our expectations were pretty low. However, we didn't expect it to be THAT bad.

Although I have an entire collection of photos of the cabinets up at my Picasa Web Album (feel free to take a look), I just share a few of the worst offenders here:

From Kitchen Cabinets, Upstate NY, Mani Niall's new book

That entire cabinet will be replaced. It had cracks in the pull-out drawers along with a few other structural issues.

From Kitchen Cabinets, Upstate NY, Mani Niall's new book

All of the shelves arrived with their laminate cracked and damaged. The rep said that the fabricators probably didn't change their saw blades between sessions. I'm not sure, but the way they arrived, they weren't well protected from shipping damage, either.

From Kitchen Cabinets, Upstate NY, Mani Niall's new book

This was interesting. We had a couple of cabinets that had red marks on them -- as if they shouldn't have gone out the door. This one revealed a pretty sizable crack.

From Kitchen Cabinets, Upstate NY, Mani Niall's new book

There are quite a few more, but the take-home message is that the rep was very decent about the whole thing and said he'd put a rush on the replacement cabinets, doors, and other parts. We should get the new ones next week. I'll keep you posted.