Founders Choice

Great, cabinets are amazing and they were able to measure for the countertop right after they installed making the countertop only a week out!

In the beginning, working with Founder's Choice was great. Everything was on time, it was easy to get responses. Every thing was installed when quoted. The gray paint Founder's Choice had as an option, was not the right color for us. So we were told to pick from the Sherwin Williams paints and bring the swatch to them. The problem came within two weeks of having the cabinets installed. The cabinets started chipping. Little tiny spots. Every cabinet. Several bigger ones as well. It's surprising how easy it flakes up. Founder's Choice came out to inspect. They took all the lower cabinet doors off, and took them back to repaint (uppers are white, in their paint with minimal chipping, probably because they are uppers). I really thought that would solve the issue. However, 1-3 weeks after the repainted doors were installed, the chipping started back up again. I emailed them again, asking if perhaps I could paint over them with a varnish or something, but was told the chipping was from "rough handling" on our end. Which is absolutely absurd. Kitchen cabinets should be able to withstand daily use. There is no rough handling, beyond opening and closing doors/drawers and the occasional bump with a bowl. They won't help me any further. The pictures provided are only a small portion of what they look like now. Now this is making me concerned for the granite we had installed by them, because they said we didnt need supports under the granite over hang. Also I have many problems with the drawers, the screws have fallen out underneath on the soft close sliders, and they are stiff to open, they make a noticeable scrapping sound when opening.

Everything went smooth. We love both pieces they made for us. The mantle is the centerpiece of our living room and the credenza holds our entertainment system equipment, magazines, blankets and children's toys (for now). We did have to order additional shelves because it only came with three and we wanted six.

Founder's Choice was subcontracted by our remodeling contractor. The Pentel bath countertops were fabricated and installed with no problems. The kitchen was a very different story. I have a U shaped kitchen with a 14 foot breakfast bar between the kitchen and dining room. The kitchen/breakfast bar installation had two very problematic issues. First, the point where two pieces of quartz met in both the breakfast bar and the kitchen countertop had very noticeable shade differences. The installers said that the quartz for the install was cut from two slabs and that the shade difference was not something they could address. The contractor had both the head of Founder's Choice and the GM of Pentel come out to look at the problem. The Founder's Choice president had nothing constructive to offer except that there was nothing that could be done. The GM from Pentel said he would apply an "enhancer" to the quartz to see if it would darken the lighter shaded quartz. He applied the "enhancer" and it had the effect of darkening the lighter shaded quartz to a point of acceptability. The second issue is the kitchen sink cutout. The cutout did not match the dimensions of the sink. This made the reveal uneven around the entire sink. Founder's Choice sent out their "sawer" to correct the problem. Long story short, the problem could not be corrected. The reason given for the mismatch was that the template for the sink didn't match the actual sink. I mentioned to all the employees of Founder's Choice that came to my house that they had taken the actual sink with them when they measured and templated the kitchen. The response was the proverbial deer in the headlight look and no further explanation, suggestion, or solution was put forward. I would not recommend this company to anyone and have suggested to my contractor that they consider using a different company in the future as their quality of work reflects poorly on them as well.

They fixed it once already -- took forever for them to come, took multiple calls to get it scheduled. At least the first repair just less than a year ago was free. Clearly a low quality countertop as there are no kids and no guerrillas living here! Yikes.

Shopping part was OK but kitchen help lacked some clear warnings about our decisions (i.e. - YOU will NOT be able to reach the second shelf if you do that ... re-inforce that ! Don't let consumers be silly!!!). One cabinet door warped - much delay and they tried to fix it and then it broke and then they ordered a new one -- new one arrived with small scratches. Granite counter CHIPPED and we are STILL waiting for repair guy to contact us. Free standing corner cabinet arrived and was very unlevel --- TOOK three months for a plan and repair. Slow, inconsistent communication, sub-standard products I am convinced.

It was a reasonable price, I shopped around quite a bit before I had them do it. I was very happy, extremely happy with the work that they did. The guy came out and was very meticulous about what he was doing. Everything was done right. Their office in Tacoma I was also very happy with, they took me around and showed me everything, told me the differences between things, we got what we wanted and we're very happy with it.