Washtenaw Woodwrights

We selected Bruce Curtis, the owner, in October of 2013 after interviewing several contractors. We chose WW because we wanted to install the Holiday Kitchen line of cabinets, and he is the only supplier in the Ann Arbor area for those cabinets. We had also visited one of his basement renovation jobs and looked at the high quality of the workmanship there.
The Holiday kitchen cabinets are what are called semi-custom. They are standard cabinets, but can be sized up
or down to the 1/8” inch to fit your space.
The planning and design process for the kitchen and bathroom took over two months. Bruce had excellent design ideas and suggestions, and he definitely knew his cabinet line. He was able to provide 3-D drawings of what the kitchen would look
like with various cabinet configurations and appliance layouts.
The biggest problem is that Bruce has one foreman/skilled carpenter/engineer and one helper doing all of the work. He then subs out the plumbing, electrical, tiling, and drywall. His foreman/carpenter is excellent, but because he is Bruce's only carpenter, he is always working at two or three places at the same time. Also, the subcontractors all have their own businesses, and for whatever reason take their time about showing up, often holding up the process for the next part of the job. All of these people did high quality, very professional work. The job when completed, is absolutely stunning and everything is like a perfectionist'sdream. But it was very, very slow.
At first, the family room was left off the plan, because the process of planning the kitchen was a lot. That turned out to be a
mistake, as those cabinets then didn’t get ordered until later, which again produced a delay.
I was promised that the job would be completed in a three month time period so that I could join my husband in Europe for a
vacation. (This excluded the fireplace which I added later.) We were a couple of weeks late getting started on demolition, and things just kept getting pushed back more throughout the entire process. There were several periods of two or three days when no one would be at the house working. And yes, there was a structural problem, but it was solved within one week's time. Again, it took three weeks to get the workmen back in here to begin to fix it, order a new cabinet, and for me to
sign off on the new drawings. We finally concluded everything around June 15, which was nine months from the
time we started the planning.
On price, we started out with a budget of $60,000. However—be forewarned. That would be the cost of purchasing standard
cabinets that need no custom sizing. In many cases, in order to fit your walls, they need to add an inch, or even so little
as a quarter inch. This all costs extra. Also, I finally ended up purchasing some of my own lighting, tiles, etc. in order to try to speed up the process and decrease the number of middlemen. Those expenses are not included in the amount listed above.
In conclusion, if you want really high quality workmanship, and are OK with having your house torn up for long periods of time, this is the place to go. Bruce has excellent design skills and his workmen, including the subs, do professional, perfectionist level work. But beware--if he tells you three months--it will be six to nine!

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They were very good and very responsive. They coordinated everything well.

The wood columns supporting our front porch were rotting and in need of repair. We took the opportunity to have the whole look of the porch re-done. We chose Washtenaw Woodwrights because we liked the design and the quality of the work that we had seen them do around town. Overall, we are very happy with our remodeled porch. The quality is excellent and it looks great. Even three years later, we continue to get compliments from friends, neighbors and even strangers.
The only negative was that the timing of the project turned out to be unfortunate as Washtenaw Woodwrights was struggling through the down economy which resulted in some delays in the completion of our project as they worked through staffing changes.

I contacted them in Nov. 2009. They were to start in early Feb. 2010. However they received the wrong windows but did not realize they were the wrong two windows until they came to install them in early Feb. 2010. They contacted me and told me they had to order new windows. They then disappeared until I contacted them in April 2010. It took to June 2010 before they did the job. The quality of the job was excellent. However much stress on my part occurred due to the fact that they did not keep me up to date on when they would complete the job. I suspect this was too small a job for this company.