Designed by Julie

Wow. Where do I begin. - Let's start with Julie. She's a really nice person and she came up with a great design for our kitchen. It is way more functional than that last layout that we had. In terms of design and layout - A+. The good review ends there. Don't ever forget Julie is a in it for the sale. We forgot. Her room design which is the best part of her product line, in our opinion, is the hook. Two of the three product lines that we bought from Julie reminded us that we were snagged by a rusty hook. COUNTERTOPS: Cambria - nice. Not as stain proof as Julie presented, but nice. CABINETS: Showcase cabinets. NEVER again. Our old cabinets were built into the room. Showcase cabinets, like most cabinets these days - even upper end cabinets - are made off-site and installed. The manufacturer, Showcase cabinets, has NO quality control. Granted, we have a lot of pieces to our kitchen, and expected a few dings but we had warped doors, cracked doors, and cabinets that were not ready to receive shelf adjustments. I can only assume that the manufacturer's quality inspectors knew that this was the case and let a defective product pass because the cabinets came with partially drilled shelf holes except for where the manufacturer needed to drill the holes to mount the shelves for shipping. I guess we were not supposed to notice. ....... Showcase policy ----- door warps up to 1/4 inch is considered acceptable. If you want doors that sit flush against the cabinet, oh well. ----- Expect the finish to crack as the wood expands and contracts. ....... We needed to have doors replaced multiple times because the company was unable to send up doors that stayed intact during shipping. Please see the pictures of the broken parts that weren't carried away by Julie.... Can we live with what we got? Yes, we don't have a choice. I am certain that we wouldn't have purchased the cabinets if we knew they would be falling apart out the box. In the end, months after the projected end-date, we have a complete set of cabinets, but for the price we paid, we expected no problems. I guess we can expect anything we want. FLOORING: We bought a high-end German designed flooring from Julie too. It is very thin. Your contractor should no this ahead of time. The flooring is brittle and will split. This is particularly true if your sub-flooring isn't perfectly flat. We needed to have our flooring fixed twice in the first two months since the original installation. This may or may not be the fault of the contractor. Designers and contractors point to teach other. What we know is that there were problems and only time will tell if the floor is ultimately going to be replaced. Here's the disclaimer for my review. Julie is based in Midland. I know people, also in the Midland area, who are very happy with their experience with Julie. I am in Flint, 45 miles away. She may not have been able to monitor quality as much as usual. Regardless, my experience was considerably less that what I expected.