CAMBRIDGE WOODWORKING

This was the worst contracting experience of my life. Andy seemed competent & confident during the quoting phase, but once the work started, the wheels came off. He was hopelessly late on the installation (attempt #1). He got half way through putting new doors on and I had to stop him. The finish on the new doors was ridiculously different than the cabinet frames (much too light). So different that it seemed as though that was the look we were shooting for. He also installed handles in the wrong places on the doors. He put them on the center of the frame instead of at the universally accepted correct way: bottom of the frame (wall cabinets) and top of the frame (base cabinets). My wife could barely reach the handles on the wall cabinets. He also used different hinges than the ones that we agreed to. The agreed upon ones would have fit perfectly. Instead, he put new holes in my frames and did not fill the routed slot where the old hinge mounted. For his second attempt, Andy attempted to match the cabinet color by putting stain on top of the existing polyurethane of the doors and then putting more polyurethane over that stain. The result was laughable and would have gotten an F in high school shop class. It looked like brown paint and had smears and bubbles. Andy claimed that he sanded and restained all the doors, but that was so obviously untrue that he might as well have been claiming the sky was plaid. For his third attempt, it appeared that he did some sanding, but only of the outer portions of the frames that were easy to sand. At this point, he succeeded in getting 50% of the doors and drawers to match, but the rest were still far off. Many of the doors had polyurethane runs in them. On some doors he had refinished the outside, but not the inside. When I pointed this out, Andy became very argumentative, telling me I could never be satisfied. We had not even gotten around to the fact that many of the handles were installed crooked, that glass panels were scratched, that drawers did not travel in their slides correctly or the damage he did to my walls and wall paper. While standing in front of me, he told me that he would take back the doors and refund my money. Then, on the phone, he told me that he was keeping my money and that all of this was my fault. I have been cheated out of $3,000 down payment (stupid on my part, never again) and have a stupid, stupid looking kitchen. Shame on you Andy.