Kitchen Refinishers

We can't say enough nice things about Tom Stocker and his workmanship, but we'll try. We gave pictures of our ugly kitchen cabinets with rotary cut oak veneer to several businesses that do kitchen refacing at the Mpls Home Show in March. Four of them come to our house to measure the kitchen to give estimates. Their quotes ranged from $6890 (Tom's) to $34,000. We have ~15 drawers, 22 cabinet openings, 38 doors, so most other kitchens would be lower than ours. The two lower bids were from contractors/business owners who do the refacing themselves and use real wood from suppliers they like. In Tom's case, he also does the refinishing himself, which keeps his costs lower (he used to refinish furniture). The two other bids were from kitchen refinishing stores that have salesmen and offer more than woodworking services, but have brochures with a canned selection of woods and doors of varying quality. They were MUCH more expensive and less knowledgable than Tom and the other carpenter we liked. We waffled between whether we were okay with veneering versus paneling, because Tom does veneering on the faces and 3/8'' paneling on the sides and the other contractor does paneling everywhere, but his bid was $2000 more. In the end, Tom said that he could do paneling at the same price, but that he has never had a complaint using the veneer with a 3M adhesive. Since we work for 3M, we had confidence in the material and the surface preparation process that Tom had detailed to us, and decided to sign with Tom and have him do the veneer. It took a couple of weeks for the doors and stuff to come in and for Tom to refinish them at his shop. He spent about two weeks in our kitchen working, plus a few misc trips early on to change heights and positions of some cabinetry, so we could get the microwave put in. Most of the time was the surface prep and cutting paneling and veneering. We were particularly impressed with Tom's craftsmanship. When he received the veneer, he refinished it and brought it over to show us. But he didn't like the way it looked, he said the grain looked funny, so he ordered in and refinished all new veneer. He received 2 drawer fronts from the factory in which the grain went the wrong way, and he sent them back and refinished new ones. He got one stick of molding with a slightly different cut than all the rest, and when he noticed it, he procured and refinished another one. A refinished edge on one of our shelves bugged him, so he sanded it down and veneered it. He was bothered by the unfinished look where our tile met our peninsula, so he refinished and installed a trim piece for it. He showed us how to adjust the European hinges, if we needed to adjust the doors some day. We also liked that Tom was so nice to our dog and two cats. The dog is kenneled during the day, and we'd shut the cats up for him, but he'd let the cats out and let them hang around when it was safe.