Many of you might already know that about six years ago I had an entire set of kitchen cabinets pull of the wall and come crashing to the floor, destroying everything, except for a few glasses and a cup. (See the April 2016 post in the archives for the details.) The cabinets had been bought and installed by Lowe’s.
They did replace the cabinets, even though I paid to have someone else install them. Unfortunately, they didn’t match the rest of the cabinets because the cabinet line I had originally purchased had been discontinued.
So who in their right mind would go back to Lowes to FINALLY get matching lower cabinets and a much needed new countertop?
Before you call the authorities to have me committed, let me give a bit of justification on why I made this decision. Having just lived through the major renovation of last year, I was hoping for an easy in easy out. Since they had the exact line in stock for the cabinets and the configuration wouldn’t be changing, I thought everything would go quickly and without drama.
Having just written that, maybe the authorities should be called!
What was the outcome? More stress and more money than I had planned on. A typical renovation? At least in my world. But this one wasn’t just mistakes, but complete disregard for my time and energy. As a result, Lowe’s Burbank store is now dead to me. I have vowed to never step inside their walls or purchase anything from them again.
They did replace the cabinets, even though I paid to have someone else install them. Unfortunately, they didn’t match the rest of the cabinets because the cabinet line I had originally purchased had been discontinued.
So who in their right mind would go back to Lowes to FINALLY get matching lower cabinets and a much needed new countertop?
Before you call the authorities to have me committed, let me give a bit of justification on why I made this decision. Having just lived through the major renovation of last year, I was hoping for an easy in easy out. Since they had the exact line in stock for the cabinets and the configuration wouldn’t be changing, I thought everything would go quickly and without drama.
Having just written that, maybe the authorities should be called!
What was the outcome? More stress and more money than I had planned on. A typical renovation? At least in my world. But this one wasn’t just mistakes, but complete disregard for my time and energy. As a result, Lowe’s Burbank store is now dead to me. I have vowed to never step inside their walls or purchase anything from them again.
Here's three reasons why:
NO ONE PICKS UP THE PHONE. EVER
Renovations run into snags. This is to be expected. More money is to be expected. Spending HOURS emailing and calling the store to try to resolve these issues was not expected. I had to pay for a design change, and it took me THREE hours and over 20 phone calls to reach someone to take my money! This was not a one-time thing. Even when someone picked up the phone, they had no idea where the kitchen design people were, and they were the only ones who could do a damn thing to resolve issues. I was told one time they were at lunch, only to find out later, one person was on vacation and the other person had Covid. If I hadn’t somehow tracked down some guy in appliances who managed to take a credit card payment over the phone, my project would have been delayed yet another week. Asking for a manager got me put on hold and hung up on ten different times.
A couple of times I was forced to drive the 25 minutes one way to the store just to get things moving along.
I still haven’t figured out how I even made the original appointment to start the project, but that was the first and last time I got someone to pick up a phone without numerous tries.
THEY LIE AND PLAY GAMES. AND NOT FUN GAMES.
Nothing came in the timeframe they described, and they made up scenarios that no one who was doing the work had ever heard of. Like to minimize the time the kitchen was totally not functional, there would be temporary plywood countertops put in place. Like a temporary sink could be put in place. (Half true, but it would have required me buying two sinks and having someone build something to drop in. All of which would have been additional money.)
The cabinets came in earlier than promised. But that meant nothing because I spent three weeks trying to get the cabinet guy to schedule the installation. He had specifically told me to call him DIRECTLY and not Lowe’s when the cabinets came in. I foolishly followed directions and then every time I called or texted him, he gave me some sob story about how far behind he was and how hard he was working to get me scheduled.
After three weeks of living with my dining room full of boxes and no date in sight, I finally called Lowe’s installation group. (Not to be confused with the Burbank store, because they actually pick up the phone.) They had no idea the cabinets had been delivered. They informed me the cabinet guy had seven days to get me a date once THEY were informed the cabinets had arrived. I have no doubt this was intentional on the part of the cabinet installer, telling me not to inform Lowe’s when my cabinets were delivered to buy him more time.
He texted me two days later late in the afternoon and said he could get his guys over tomorrow. My take on it was, he was hoping that such short notice would mean I would say no, and he could go back to Lowe’s and say he had offered me a date and I wasn’t available.
I called his bluff, said yes, and got the entire contents of the cabinets packed up in one night.
THEIR CONTRACTORS REQUIRE SUPERVISION. A LOT OF SUPERVISION
The guys who demoed the kitchen saved my back splash, which I wanted to keep. No easy job and I did give them high marks on that. They got the cabinets in and cleaned up after themselves. On the surface, they seemed good. Until it came time to reconnect my dishwasher and garbage disposal. But let me not get ahead of myself.
Once the cabinets were in, there was no use of the sink, dishwasher or garbage disposal until the countertops came in. I had ordered porcelain. In doing research, they are cheaper than quartz and very durable once you get them installed. I did see that during fabrication, they were easy to crack if you had installers who didn’t know how to work with the material. Something that would come back to haunt me later.
Even though the cabinets were in stock, just eight miles from my house, it took five weeks to get an install date. Five weeks of washing dishes in the bathroom sink and new doggie shower.
The morning of the install, I got a call from the countertop place. There was a major problem. Two different slabs had been cracked when they were cutting them. The suggestion was made that they didn’t think porcelain was going to work and I would have to change to quartz. I needed to call the store.
The women from the countertop place and I both worked in tandem trying to track down someone to pick up the phone from Lowe’s Burbank. It took almost a full morning. Once we finally talked to Lowe’s they informed me quartz was going to be somewhere around another three thousand dollars. They would get back to me.
Later that day, the countertop installers informed me it had been a “defective lot of porcelain” (code for we finally found someone who knows what how to do this) and they had located another slab. They would let me know when they had it cut and call me with a date.
Two more weeks went by, and they finally showed up. Since the old backsplash and the wall were uneven, I had paid for an extra transition piece of porcelain to try to solve the problem. The installers had no idea how to make it work and I ended up having to tell them to cut a piece so it would lay flat against the wall. They used white caulk to put it in place and a lot of it got smeared over my dark tile backsplash. I had to have them come back a week later to clean it all up.
I finally thought I was in the home stretch when the plumbers came. I would have my kitchen back!
But of course, there were problems. The garbage disposal was missing the piece to connect it to the sink, lost by the cabinet demolition crew. Because I wanted to get to the end of this nightmare and the garbage disposal was old, I had them put in a new one. NEVER have a plumber put in something that they supply. They charge you twice as much and I know that. Which tells you how at the end of my rope I was.
They tried the sink and the garbage disposal out and headed out the door. I threw some dirty dishes in the dishwasher to give it a spin. The water went in fine, but when it came out, it came rushing into the new cabinet under the sink. Not leaking. Rushing. So hard I heard it from the other room.
When they arrived back about twenty minutes later after my frantic call, the first thing the plumber said, “I was afraid that was going to happen.”
EXCUSE ME?
“Yeah, the hose that should have been there to connect it was missing, so I used a standard one. But I had my doubts it was going to work.”
Maybe something you could have mentioned to me? Or something you should have tested before you headed out to Friday night happy hour?
I had to contact a GE appliance center and dish out $40.00 to get a couple of hoses on special delivery. After nine weeks of not having a working kitchen, the project was finally finished.
Do I love it? Yes, having all the cabinets match and light countertops is great, but it took a couple of days to get over all the stress and work before I did.
Will I ever remodel anything again? I will. Just not for a while. And never with Lowe’s. Although with their total lack of customer service, I have my doubts they will still be in business when I finally go back down renovation road.
NO ONE PICKS UP THE PHONE. EVER
Renovations run into snags. This is to be expected. More money is to be expected. Spending HOURS emailing and calling the store to try to resolve these issues was not expected. I had to pay for a design change, and it took me THREE hours and over 20 phone calls to reach someone to take my money! This was not a one-time thing. Even when someone picked up the phone, they had no idea where the kitchen design people were, and they were the only ones who could do a damn thing to resolve issues. I was told one time they were at lunch, only to find out later, one person was on vacation and the other person had Covid. If I hadn’t somehow tracked down some guy in appliances who managed to take a credit card payment over the phone, my project would have been delayed yet another week. Asking for a manager got me put on hold and hung up on ten different times.
A couple of times I was forced to drive the 25 minutes one way to the store just to get things moving along.
I still haven’t figured out how I even made the original appointment to start the project, but that was the first and last time I got someone to pick up a phone without numerous tries.
THEY LIE AND PLAY GAMES. AND NOT FUN GAMES.
Nothing came in the timeframe they described, and they made up scenarios that no one who was doing the work had ever heard of. Like to minimize the time the kitchen was totally not functional, there would be temporary plywood countertops put in place. Like a temporary sink could be put in place. (Half true, but it would have required me buying two sinks and having someone build something to drop in. All of which would have been additional money.)
The cabinets came in earlier than promised. But that meant nothing because I spent three weeks trying to get the cabinet guy to schedule the installation. He had specifically told me to call him DIRECTLY and not Lowe’s when the cabinets came in. I foolishly followed directions and then every time I called or texted him, he gave me some sob story about how far behind he was and how hard he was working to get me scheduled.
After three weeks of living with my dining room full of boxes and no date in sight, I finally called Lowe’s installation group. (Not to be confused with the Burbank store, because they actually pick up the phone.) They had no idea the cabinets had been delivered. They informed me the cabinet guy had seven days to get me a date once THEY were informed the cabinets had arrived. I have no doubt this was intentional on the part of the cabinet installer, telling me not to inform Lowe’s when my cabinets were delivered to buy him more time.
He texted me two days later late in the afternoon and said he could get his guys over tomorrow. My take on it was, he was hoping that such short notice would mean I would say no, and he could go back to Lowe’s and say he had offered me a date and I wasn’t available.
I called his bluff, said yes, and got the entire contents of the cabinets packed up in one night.
THEIR CONTRACTORS REQUIRE SUPERVISION. A LOT OF SUPERVISION
The guys who demoed the kitchen saved my back splash, which I wanted to keep. No easy job and I did give them high marks on that. They got the cabinets in and cleaned up after themselves. On the surface, they seemed good. Until it came time to reconnect my dishwasher and garbage disposal. But let me not get ahead of myself.
Once the cabinets were in, there was no use of the sink, dishwasher or garbage disposal until the countertops came in. I had ordered porcelain. In doing research, they are cheaper than quartz and very durable once you get them installed. I did see that during fabrication, they were easy to crack if you had installers who didn’t know how to work with the material. Something that would come back to haunt me later.
Even though the cabinets were in stock, just eight miles from my house, it took five weeks to get an install date. Five weeks of washing dishes in the bathroom sink and new doggie shower.
The morning of the install, I got a call from the countertop place. There was a major problem. Two different slabs had been cracked when they were cutting them. The suggestion was made that they didn’t think porcelain was going to work and I would have to change to quartz. I needed to call the store.
The women from the countertop place and I both worked in tandem trying to track down someone to pick up the phone from Lowe’s Burbank. It took almost a full morning. Once we finally talked to Lowe’s they informed me quartz was going to be somewhere around another three thousand dollars. They would get back to me.
Later that day, the countertop installers informed me it had been a “defective lot of porcelain” (code for we finally found someone who knows what how to do this) and they had located another slab. They would let me know when they had it cut and call me with a date.
Two more weeks went by, and they finally showed up. Since the old backsplash and the wall were uneven, I had paid for an extra transition piece of porcelain to try to solve the problem. The installers had no idea how to make it work and I ended up having to tell them to cut a piece so it would lay flat against the wall. They used white caulk to put it in place and a lot of it got smeared over my dark tile backsplash. I had to have them come back a week later to clean it all up.
I finally thought I was in the home stretch when the plumbers came. I would have my kitchen back!
But of course, there were problems. The garbage disposal was missing the piece to connect it to the sink, lost by the cabinet demolition crew. Because I wanted to get to the end of this nightmare and the garbage disposal was old, I had them put in a new one. NEVER have a plumber put in something that they supply. They charge you twice as much and I know that. Which tells you how at the end of my rope I was.
They tried the sink and the garbage disposal out and headed out the door. I threw some dirty dishes in the dishwasher to give it a spin. The water went in fine, but when it came out, it came rushing into the new cabinet under the sink. Not leaking. Rushing. So hard I heard it from the other room.
When they arrived back about twenty minutes later after my frantic call, the first thing the plumber said, “I was afraid that was going to happen.”
EXCUSE ME?
“Yeah, the hose that should have been there to connect it was missing, so I used a standard one. But I had my doubts it was going to work.”
Maybe something you could have mentioned to me? Or something you should have tested before you headed out to Friday night happy hour?
I had to contact a GE appliance center and dish out $40.00 to get a couple of hoses on special delivery. After nine weeks of not having a working kitchen, the project was finally finished.
Do I love it? Yes, having all the cabinets match and light countertops is great, but it took a couple of days to get over all the stress and work before I did.
Will I ever remodel anything again? I will. Just not for a while. And never with Lowe’s. Although with their total lack of customer service, I have my doubts they will still be in business when I finally go back down renovation road.
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