"Have you ever went into a Lowes, Home Depot or Costco and asked to see the owner? Of course not; that's ludicrous. It does nevertheless shed some light on why acquiring services from the huge box stores often ends in catastrophe. Let me say at the beginning that I have nothing versus the box stores. In fact I invest a number of thousand dollars there every year. If I require an item they carry I pick it up, take it home, plug it in and utilize it. If it doesn't work appropriately I return it for a replacement or my cash back. No issue. Have you ever tried to return a cooking area or bath remodel? Obviously not; that's absurd too. That's another reason why the huge box model does not work well for complex design/build jobs. Make no mistake the box shops want quite to offer leading quality services as well as off the shelf items. It's not for lack of desire that they fall short. Why would a homeowner think about buying a kitchen area or bath from a shop like Home Depot or Lowes?

There are 3 primary factors:

1) We assume the cost will be better considering that we gain from their leveraged purchasing power.

2) We presume they will be around in case we have any service warranty problems in the future.

3) They use financing and/or other rewards.

Let's examine these one by one. Initially, while it holds true that large chains purchase more volume than a lot of retail outlets, they also get some items (eg cabinets) from name brand name manufacturers that are not of the exact same quality as those the manufacturer offers their merchants. This supplies package store with much better margins but at the expenditure of the homeowner who is getting a product of somewhat lesser quality marketed under the exact same brand name. Secondly, while many big chains have excellent return and service warranty policies, as soon as you add outdoors subcontractors and the subcontractor's subcontractors to the formula it becomes exceptionally tough to fix any of the myriad concerns that can come up during or after a kitchen area or restroom remodel. Finally, the deal of funding or some other token reward will never ever compensate for the problems and aggravations typically related to box store construction jobs of any size. Also, a lot of sellers have access to 3rd party funding and want to toss in a sink or some other item to close a sale.

Let's go through a simplified example of contracting with a box store to have a kitchen area remodeled. First the homeowner visits the cooking area department of the shop either with dimensions of their own or to set up for the shop to send somebody to their house to gather the necessary information. So the very first individual the house owner has contact with is the sales representative in the store. Next a second person visits the home and sketches a floor plan which is reclaimed to the shop and offered to a designer, which may or might not be the original sales representative.

The designer develops a kitchen design and welcomes the homeowner to the shop to examine it and look a cabinet and counter top alternatives. If other decisions are to be made, such as plumbing or lighting fixtures, the property owner will need to deal with individuals in those departments to make those choices and get the products needed. Presuming that the homeowner approves the style and agrees to the rate they then spend for the complete price of the cabinets and maybe the counter top material too. The job is then committed the expediting department to order the products and choose the subcontractor to give the job to. This subcontractor in many cases has actually never seen the job and is sweating off a pay sheet that determines what they get paid for each task of a project.

It is worth noting that the main subcontractor, seldom if ever, deals with the project himself. They pass the project to among their subcontractors who in turn uses whatever labor is at their disposal to do the job. None of the subcontractors who really do the work desire to continue working under this plan any longer than they need to. For one thing, the pay isn't that good. Package stores squeeze the primary subcontractor so they can provide attractive prices to their clients. The main subcontractor in turn squeezes his subcontractors so that he can make as much as possible on each task. The subcontractor who does the work will quit as quickly as he has a better offer or can get a job of his own. Often this occurs in the middle of a project. It's not hard to imagine what sort of problems that develops. The cabinets are shipped directly to the client's house where somebody must be waiting to accept the shipment. If the subcontractor who is to do the work is even slightly expert he will examine the order for damage before deconstructing the house owner's cooking area therefore preventing a major troublesome delay if among the main components has arrived damaged.

Now you have some idea of the variety of individuals included and how no one individual has actually followed the job from the really beginning to a happy conclusion. This technique supplies a lot of chances for miscommunication, absence of follow up and general lethargy which result in the scary stories everybody has actually heard of sometimes. If a kitchen area or bath remodel is in your future, think about finding a smaller sized, perhaps household owned company where individual attention and duty are the hallmarks. Cabinets and countertops are products. The success and tension level of the job will be figured out by the care and professionalism of the person you deal with and they ought to be there for the entire task."