Howard Miller Kitchens Baths Additions
About us
Howard Miller Kitchens Baths Additions has been serving the Northern Suburbs and North Shore Communities of Chicago since 1986, with thoughtful design / build services and attention to detail, specializing in kitchens, bathrooms, basements, home additions and other residential remodeling projects.
Business highlights
Services we offer
Howard Miller Kitchens Baths Additions is a full service design / build company specializing in residential improvement, remodeling and additions. We take your dreams from conception to reality.
Accepted Payment Methods
- CreditCard
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Update:The response from Howard Miller is not true. This guy was inour house and gave us an estimate for complete bathroom remodel.
"We never met this person or gave this person an estimate to remodel a kitchen or bathroom! We gave them a estimate for some custom glass shelves, over the telephone. In which case, our price could seem high. Our price would have included going to the customer's home, measuring for the glass shelves and delivering them to the home and installing them in the cabinets. We probably quoted on a thicker crystal clear glass with polished edges and micro bevels; probably not the same glass the customer purchased. If this person measured for the shelves themselves, picked them up from the glass shop and delivered and installed them, of course they would save money. If we were doing a complete remodeling of their kitchen; the glass shelves would have been included in the job, without any jobsite and delivery fees associated with them. This person acted as their own general contractor to save money. Although, I am sure they saved some money, they did not factor in the value of their time for designing, estimating and producing the job. A good design / build company, may seem high at first. They give a turnkey contract price, including all of the items a homeowner never thinks of, but are part of the job. These expenses always come back and puts the homeowner way beyond there original budget, when they general the job themselves! By hiring a good general contractor, there is less risk for the homeowner. There are fewer surprises. The general contractor takes care of everything, with great efficiency. The homeowner does not have to take time off of work or away from their business. Would any normal person go to work everyday, do their job to the best of their ability, give their all, give their customer high value and take all of the risk for free? People hire our company and many like ours, because they see the value in it. We normally do the entire job and do not sell glass shelves, by themselves. We were just trying to help these people out, because they were nice and needed assistance. We have to pay someone to drive out and measure. The markup in the glass shelves alone does not cover for our installers time or for his gas. I don't believe this person considered our added services when she compared prices. Howard Miller President Howard Miller Kitchens Baths Additions"
This is where things started to go south. Instead of getting the estimate for the living room a couple of days later, we received them a week later after sending an email to Howard to "check-in" with him. When we received them, the estimate total was $30,000. $10,000 over our budget. After talking to Howard and letting him know our budget, he said he would revise the estimate and get it down to $20,000. The next estimate he gave us was $25,000 which was still over budget. After going back and forth with him over email more than 10 times, he finally told me the only way he could get it to $20,000 is if I were to be open to paying in cash. As naive as I was at this point, I almost agreed to it. However, talking to friends and family, they thought that paying in cash was a warning sign. So I finally told him that that was not an option. After this, he said that it wasn't possible to go any lower than the $25,000 he estimated. If we had known this in the first place, we wouldn't have signed the contract.
So when I asked if we could get part of the retainer fee back since we no longer wanted to move forward with the project, they told us to wait until January of 2013 to see if we could work something out then after the holidays, since it was a very busy time for them at the current moment and they had some personal events going on they needed to take care of. We agreed to have them reach out to us when they weren't so busy and we could talk about seeing eye to eye on the living room project. I never heard from them in January or February. At this point, I knew for sure I wasn't going to do the project with them but wanted to see how long it would take them to reach out to me. Finally in April of 2013, I finally had to "check-in" with them again to get conversation started again, because at that point I knew it they weren't going to reach out to me. I ended up getting no responses back from them. Finally I received a response about 4 weeks later stating that Howard was having "email difficulties". They claimed they did 150 hours of work ($15,000 worth), mind you alot of the 150 hours was spent by Howard trying to go back and forth with me on hitting our original budget of $20,000 he said he could do in the first place. After all was said and done, Howard didn't think we should get any of the retainer back given the amount of hours he put into our project, however, for good business ethics, they said they would give us $500 back and of course if we would not speak poorly of them. At that point, I told them it wasn't worth it for us and we would rather let others know what we went through instead of the $500.
So to sum this whole experience up, I think Rosanne and Howard are capable of doing great work as Rosanne has a great eye for design and Howard is very detail oriented with his contracting work. However, they seem to be very disorganized, continuously behind schedule, late with deadlines, and can't stick to estimates. I don't think they purposely tried to take advantage of us, but there were a lot of empty promises on their end that left us hanging out to dry. I know we were in the wrong to sign a contract without having the estimate in writing (even though we had a verbal one) and we have chalked this up as a "lesson learned" for us and won't do that again. I hope that this review will help the next person working with Howard and Rosanne, and can learn from our mistake and know the warning signs as well, if they happen to go through the same process.
With a Howard Miller project, everything that can possibly be considered, is considered. His estimates are extremely thorough; there are no surprises if he can possibly avoid it. He is extremely detail-oriented, down to things you never heard of and don't think are important, but which do matter to the project as a whole. He is very very good at looking at the trees while not losing sight of the forest.
He doesn't sugar-coat things, nor does he exaggerate. If he doesn't think what you want will work, or if he has a better idea, he will tell you - diplomatically. If there's something he is unfamiliar with, he won't BS you, he will research the daylights out of it and come back to you with a thoughtful recommendation. He has strong opinions, but he has architectural training and years of experience to back them up. You don't have to take his advice. But in my experience, it's really better if you do, because he's generally right.
I am most impressed with Howard's dedication to improving energy efficiency in homes, and his commitment to learning new methods of home improvement. He doesn't simply recommend the latest new gadget or whatever. He makes sure it's right for you and your home. With Howard, there is no such thing as a client he doesn't care about.
He does have one flaw: he tends to run late for appointments. Nobody's perfect. We have trusted Howard Miller with our home for nearly 25 years and never regretted it. Highest possible recommendation.
"I am humbly blown away! The members are wonderful. My wife and business partner, Rosanne and I consider them to be dear friends and among the best people to work for. We have many clients just like them and treat all of them in the same manner. Many companys come in with a fast estimate and a low price; figuring that they will make up the difference in high profit additonal work orders. Of couse, the customer does not have much of a choice once the job is started and the walls are torn up. Our approach is to do a though examination and investigation of the job. We then come up with detailed plans and specifications. This enables us to plan the job, both materials and workflow effectively, with efficiencies built in. We may seem more expensive up front, but we have a complete job plan that actually saves our customers money, once the job is completed. Over the years, our additional work orders have averaged below 5%. Most of our additional work stems from our customer's adding back to the job, what they took out in the first place ad well as being soo happy with the work; they add more projects while we are doing the work! We would rather plan the work, to reduce the cost of the job; than to make it up in additional work, that cost more money due to bad planning, rework, costly re-ording of materials, starting and stopping labor, extra delivery charges, ...... Why is there never enough time to do it right; but always enough time to do it over? We have been serving your friends and neighbors since 1986. Anything less could cost you more! Howard Miller Kitchens Baths Additions, Northbrook, IL Call us today! 847-291-7050 howardmillerkitchens.com"
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