SANTA FE CUSTOM WORKS

Angie’s list re: Santa Fe Custom Works Our experience with SFCW began on October 23, 2012 and ended on about June 18, 2013. When we were out of town & our home was found to have flooded from a defective water heater, our insurance company’s remediation contractor contacted SFCW to evaluate the damage to our cabinetry. One of SFCW’s owners spent considerable time at our home taking dozens of photos and measuring in order to provide replacements. Our kitchen cabinets had been custom made to our exact specifications 22 years ago and SFCW was told repeatedly that we wanted them replicated exactly. I told them I had measured my kitchen utensils and food boxes to fit exactly into our drawers and shelves. SFCW submitted a bid for replacements for cabinets in several rooms, including the kitchen & laundry room. We accepted their bid on January 10, 2013. We paid them $20,000, as the down payment. We subsequently paid them another $18,000. Shorty after the first payment, we mentioned to an appliance dealer that our stove would have ‘feet’ on it because our custom cabinets were 2” higher than standard and 4” deeper than standard. He passed that information on to the SFCW co-owner, Cindy Mauchley who had created our bid. When we walked in to her office later that day she growled at us with, “I had NO IDEA your cabinets were not standard size..” She was furious with US because SHE had failed to measure either the height or the depth of our custom cabinets which she had verbally agreed to replicate!!!!! Fortunately, she learned of her gross error before completing the drawings of the cabinets!!! That was problem #1. The bid we had accepted from SFCW included the kitchen and the laundry room cabinets. After her embarrassing error, Cindy removed herself from our project and her business partner, Dave Greig took over. They began installing the kitchen cabinets in March. After the 31 drawers were installed, we noticed that they were each emblazoned with a large wood-burned Santa Fe Custom Works LOGO and they were not the same size as they were before. A drawer that was over 2” deep & held a phone book was now only 1 1/2” deep & it held practically nothing! That was problem #2. After an extended fight with Mr. Greig, during which he accused me of being an “expert” who should have known the drawers would be more shallow because they were using different drawer glides, he agreed to remove 30 of the drawers and we contracted with another cabinet maker to build drawers to match our measurements. In the remainder of our project Dave Greig was rude, insolent, hateful, insulting and unyielding. His attitude was problem #3. Near the completion of the kitchen cabinet installation, SFCW workers asked us to tell them our plans for the laundry room. It was being changed. We spent a couple of days planning the cabinets with Jeff and David and they were very good. But we did not get the CAD drawings for the laundry room cabinets for SIX WEEKS after those discussions!!!!! Now it is late-April! We made a couple of minor changes to the drawings & signed them 2 days later. It was only then that they announced that our laundry cabinets would be installed in 6 weeks - that being June 17, 2013!!!!!!!!!! Our home project was to be finished in May...7 months after the flood. Part of the laundry room cabinet was a simple mud sink lower cabinet with 2 doors. In order to finish our project and get moved back into our home, we had to wait four weeks because SFCW would not even agree to put the framing for the sink cabinet in so that we could have the plumber install our sink and the fabricator install the new counter top and get our final plumbing inspection and then our final project inspection. I begged, beseeched and implored Mr. Greig to just install the walls of the little sink cabinet so we would not have to have the plumber and fabricator wait another 4 weeks and he finally said he would only do it for an extra $2500!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! That was problem #4, 5 & 6. Needless to say we turned down that idiotic offer. Mr. Greig knew how long we had been out of our home and how close we were to completion but he dug in his heels and hatefully refused to budge to accommodate us. And so on June 17, 2013, SFCW had our laundry room cabinets ready to be painted by our contractor. Our contractor picked them up, painted them and delivered them to our home. because the high and mighty SFCW does not stoop to painting. Then SFCW’s installers began to install them. And so we did not get our plumbing final inspection and then our final home inspection until the end of June. We are not going in to all of the hateful emails we received from Mr. Dave Greig. But I will provide them all if Angie’s List wants them. We have dealt with many, many contractors and sub-contractors in the 48 + years of residence in our home and NEVER have we experienced the utter incompetence of Cindy Mauchley, a co-owner of SFCW, or been treated with such contemptible hatred as we were by SFCW’s co-owner Dave Greig. The workers we worked with, Jeff and David, were pleasant and capable. But we would NEVER, EVER recommend Santa Fe Custom Works to anyone and we give the owner’s and their Company an F minus.