Home Depot
Kitchen Cabinet Defects, Wrong Molding and Missing Parts

Other shoppers should hear about my dealings with KraftMaid and Home Depot before they repeat my mistake, because I was treated terribly. Half a year of trying to fix the problems in my kitchen has felt like speaking to a wall.

The cabinets were bought while Home Depot ran a promotion in which the discount grew as each price tier was reached. Being a careful buyer, I took their estimate directly to Lowes to verify that I had the best deal. The Home Depot kitchen designer promised a price match if Lowes was cheaper. That very day Lowes gave me an estimate that was lower, and it also included a no-tax offer on custom cabinet orders when Lowes handled the installation.

I brought the Lowes quote back to Home Depot. They agreed to match the Lowes cabinet price and to give me the tax savings provided I hired Home Depot's installers. A matched price meant I had zero incentive to choose Home Depot rather than Lowes, because the cost was identical. Its closeness to my home was the main reason I stayed with Home Depot.

Matching the Lowes installation offer required a measurement visit by Home Depot's third-party installers, New Life Construction. This visit doubles as protection against measuring errors, since Home Depot otherwise charges a restocking fee on anything that has to be swapped for size or height changes. The installer who measured held a copy of my design and therefore understood how every piece was supposed to be arranged, adjusted and positioned. A few days afterward New Life Construction quoted me an installation price close to twice the Lowes figure. Home Depot said the no-tax part would still apply but that it could not match the installation quote. I had just placed the cabinet order, and this was my fear exactly: they were walking back what I was told at the outset.

The designer next told me to collect a bid from a licensed contractor. When I did, Home Depot admitted it could not get anywhere near that price.

The cabinets were scheduled for delivery after four weeks. In the first box, delivered by UPS, was a door that I had understood would be glass with pewter detailing, but it held a pewter insert and no glass at all. I told the kitchen designer at Home Depot that a "glass door" had arrived with no glass. She suggested the glass might come in a later shipment or that this was how it traveled. I doubted that, because I saw nowhere for the glass to go, so I researched it myself. Indeed, the door is categorized with the glass doors but is sold without glass, one more design blunder.

The rest of the cabinets reached me within days and the installers got started. Work moved along reasonably, and a handful of questions about vague instructions came up, which I considered normal. Only a few cabinets were left, and they had to wait for the countertops, so the crew started on the crown molding. And there was the surprise: the molding in the design did not fit, and it had to be stretched an extra inch and a quarter to reach the ceiling. It sounds minor, but stretching it made the library detail look oversized, and what was being installed was not the design I approved and paid for. I had the installers halt immediately and move to the drawers and cabinet doors. That brought another discovery. A number of drawer fronts and doors had left the factory damaged, with chipped corners, wrong colors on some, bubbled paint, cracks, rough edges and dents, every flaw imaginable. Also absent were all of the deluxe roll-out shelves, as well as my pegs and peg boards.

The damaged pieces, the absent shelves and the molding were all things I reported to the kitchen designer at Home Depot. Her reply was canned: she had never seen such a thing, and no other customer of hers had faced so much damaged product. Later she told me that Mike Bath, the KraftMaid representative, proposed visiting my house to confirm the damage and decide whether the cause was quality assurance or shipping.

The designer and Mike Bath arrived together, and I walked them through the defects. Mike Bath initially accepted that some items needed replacing, but then he grew defensive and argued that wood naturally has cracks that add to its beauty. I interrupted him to say that I had paid upward of $27k for these cabinets and that a crack running across a door front is a manufacturing defect and a quality assurance matter, not natural beauty. He answered that I might never be satisfied with the product, as I appeared to be looking for fault with everything. Customers who pay this much naturally expect better service. Even so, Mike Bath promised to replace the plainly defective doors and to send a cabinet medic to re-spray those with missing paint or small blemishes.

The crown molding came next. Mike Bath consented to collect the molding already there and exchange it for a similar profile that was a bit taller, which would give me the look I was after. When the visit ended I believed I would receive what I wanted, namely new drawer fronts and doors and the molding that ought to have been delivered from the beginning.

Seven days went by with none of the replacements we agreed on arriving, although some of the absent items slowly turned up. I received the deluxe roll-outs and the pegs, but not the peg boards. The designer promised to check and respond when I raised it. Several days later nothing had happened, so I asked once more about the replacements and their arrival date. Her reply was that they were on the way, and she added that she apparently forgot to order my peg boards because I had paid only for the pegs. Put plainly, I paid for pegs that are useless without peg boards nobody ordered, and after this miserable experience I am unsure I want to wait more or spend more.

Everything in my kitchen was stalled until the replacements and the correct molding showed up. In the interim, the countertops went in and the appliances were delivered and installed, so only the replacement and missing parts remained.

I could not tell my general contractor when the rest would arrive, so he took other jobs. Given the molding mistake and the replacement delays, I thought about asking the designer to arrange New Life Construction for the installation. She booked a visit by their lead installer to look over the project and price it. Once again the figure was very high, but if the tax savings were honored as earlier, part of it would be offset. Getting a working kitchen quickly was worth a premium to me compared with the 4 more weeks that my general contractor estimated.

New Life Construction, I was told, would need a few days to confer on how to deal with certain hiccups in my installation. When I asked what these were, I learned that the molding was only one of the problems. The hutch of three stacked cabinets could not fit where it was meant to go, since the ceiling there is too low. New Life Construction provided the dimensions used to order the cabinets. Hence the designer must have used an incorrect measurement, or the original measuring was wrong. In either case I had three cabinets that did not fit, no crown molding, and a list of possible problems that was still incomplete.

The installer also flagged the molding as a major issue. By his explanation, the molding detail from the design breaks a policy at New Life Construction that calls for a radius from 0 to 7 inches. They said that policy had existed for years and the designer ought to have known it before she turned in the design. I find it troubling that their representative measured before the cabinets were ordered while holding every design specification, and nobody warned me of any violation. Once more, Home Depot and New Life Construction each refused to accept blame, and neither suggested any remedy.

Stepping back, for nearly 3 weeks I got no news whatsoever, and eventually a voicemail told me only that Home Depot could not carry out the installation. To be candid, the whole exchange left a bad taste.

Again I asked the designer where my crown molding was and why I had not received it. It had come to the Home Depot store, and no one called. At last she set a time to bring the right molding to my house herself and to collect the 3 hutch cabinets that were too big, whether through bad measuring or bad design. I used the occasion to tell her how frustrated I was at losing a working kitchen for months to plain incompetence. She revealed that her supervisor had ordered her not to raise the installation with me, a further warning sign that Home Depot was trying again to duck responsibility and abandon me, the customer.

Finally my general contractor could complete the installation, only to run into more trouble. The shipment held too little Dove white crown molding and too much Sage. Sage toe kicks had never been ordered, and two valance pieces, which were meant as kick plate details, came in the wrong color. So we were again stuck waiting for Home Depot to send replacements, and the job could not be finished.

Moving on, the contractor began the molding detail around the island columns and the hutch, and one more issue appeared: the detail molding for the Sage hutch was ordered too wide. Here is a summary to this point. The crown molding was ordered incorrectly. Three cabinets were too large for their space. Two valance pieces were the wrong color. One extra cabinet was ordered by mistake. The "glass doors" lack glass, which isn't an available option either. One color of crown molding was short while another was overshipped. Peg boards were never ordered. Because of a measuring or design error, light rail also had to be ordered. Not a single item has been corrected.

Yet again I asked the designer about the missing items and learned that the replacement drawers and doors, which I had awaited for almost two months, had never been ordered. At that point I told her I would go to the corporate offices of Home Depot and KraftMaid, since writing to her was plainly getting me nowhere. She asked for a final list of the drawer and door replacements so she could hand it to the KraftMaid rep and fix matters. I politely emailed it, restating the previous list and adding that the "pewter doors" had started to rust. This was the final blow in an awful experience that already included shoddy workmanship. KraftMaid did not address it; I was told pewter cannot rust and that they would have to study it more.

A text message later came from Mike Bath saying the vendor, he had just learned, had solved the grill rust problem and the grills should not rust anymore. This suggests to me that KraftMaid knew about the defect and went on selling the faulty product anyway.

After several months, the crown molding and the light rail I ordered have still not come. The drawer and door replacements, supposedly ordered more than two months earlier, are also missing, and the remedy offered for the pewter grills is merely to supply new ones.

Weeks later the new doors and drawers came, and with them four of the six pewter grill inserts. One of the pewter grills was damaged on arrival, and inside of a week all four replacements were visibly rusting. Can it get worse? It can. The cabinet repair person who had been promised to me months before at last phoned to book a visit to restore the cabinets to factory standard. If you ask me, that standard must be low, given that these cabinets passed the first quality assurance inspection. Nonetheless I welcomed his call.

He arrived punctually and had me mark the trouble spots with blue painters tape. After I marked them all, he promised to handle everything with no difficulty. He had brought only the wax pen and paint pen that came with my original order. Is that KraftMaid's way of returning cabinets to factory standard, essentially a crayon plus a paint pen? I am not surprised. Partway through, he said he had received a wax stick and paint pen for the white cabinets alone and nothing for the sage hutch, though I had named its imperfections to the Kitchen and Bath designer and to Mike Bath of KraftMaid. About 5 weeks later, on September 24th, the cabinet repair company returned to touch up what remained of the Sage cabinets. Some imperfections can still be seen, but I don't want any more repair attempts, which only postpone the inevitable. Overall, the craftsmanship is poor and the customer service from Home Depot and KraftMaid is atrocious.

Out of my own pocket I paid my general contractor more than our agreed installation bid so that he could replace the defective doors and drawers. Rusted doors remain, because KraftMaid can't produce goods without defects, and the blemishes that the cabinet medic could not fix with his wax pen are still there. Also, I took several items back to Home Depot for a refund, and not one has been processed. The store has held the merchandise for 4 weeks without a single credit to me. I believed that a returned item is usually credited the same day. After repeated follow-ups I was told a manager would phone me. Nobody has, and I have received no credit.

My trust in KraftMaid's quality control is gone. How Home Depot's management has treated my account makes me very angry, and New Life Construction strikes me as equally deceptive. I now have to think about legal action, since I got a poorly crafted product that was sold to me with defects known in advance. Home Depot broke its measurement and installation guarantees and offered a promotion that it did not honor, a plain bait and switch. I have also been seriously inconvenienced by the incompetence and weak leadership of KraftMaid, Home Depot and New Life Construction.

A similar letter has gone to the corporate office of Home Depot, and I have heard from nobody.

Company: Home Depot
Country: USA
State: Georgia
City: Atlanta
Address: 2455 Paces Ferry Road
Phone: 7704338211
Site: homedepot.com

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