SHOWCASE KITCHEN AND BATH

They were good. I used this company three times already.

Bottom line Showcase Kitchen and Bath produced an awesome, beautiful and efficient kitchen that we love. Charlie Rutledge designed our new kitchen. He listened and gave us many floor plans from which to chose. After he laid out the various designs, he again listened to our inputs and we came up with an award winning design. He was very patient and helpful with the colors, tile and materials. He was very knowledgeable in all the ?GOTCHAS ? areas that a project can create. The project was original estimated at APPROX $86,000. We expected some up charges along the way. We were very firm and very up front that our MAXIMUM BUDGET was $100,000. Not a penny more. This was a deal breaker if it could not happen in that max budget number. We were assured it would not exceed that number but it may be close. Forest Construction was the general contractor for the job. Steve Love was the site foreman. Steve was a dream to work with. He is great guy, very knowledgeable and conscientious foreman. He completed the project exactly on time. Only three months. Truly a significant accomplishment. We ran into some small problems along the way but nothing outrageous. The real problems started when we got into the project. The estimates to remove a load bearing structural wall and replace it with a steel post and laminated wood beam were woefully short. We had to get the city of Camarillo to permit the finished attic space above the kitchen and had to do some significant work to bring the room above into code. Bottom line this fabulous kitchen ended up costing us $126,000 and I did the interior painting myself. We did not have any money left over for a floor at all so we polished the concrete slab and we still have the polished floor to this day five years later. I do not feel we were "GOUGED" at all but I am still very disappointed in the woefully inadequate estimate. Had we known that this project was going to cost $26,000 more that our max budget allowance we would have never have started the project. I will say that we did receive $126,000 worth of value and because the attic space is now permitted we can increase the square footage of or home and increased it's value by that much more. Because the cost estimate was off by over 30% from the original estimate and $26,000 over our MAX budget, we had a hard time coming up with the remaining funds. We were threatened with being taken to collections if we did not pay up in two months. We negotiated a payment schedule with the Showcase Kitchen and Bath and they gave us an additional three months to pay the balance. So if you want a truly beautiful kitchen and don?t care what it costs I would recommend these guys. This was our first major renovation to any home we have owned and learned a ton. We will consult a attorney before spending money like this in the future. Would I use these guys again, YES, the designs are that good but I will be much more aggressive in making sure the estimates are better.

Overall we felt disappointed. If you spend that kid of hard earned money , we expect everything to be done first class and upfront. I described the majority of it earlier, but we felt deflated and taken advantage of. I have prevented four or five friends from using Showcase. They all come over and love our house, then i explain what we went through to get here and they understand it's not worth it.

Job was estimated to take around 4 months, still waiting for it be finished at 9 months. Poor quality subcontractors... either didn't show or work had to be ripped out and done over. We had to point out to the foreman and owner the poor quality workmanship, and they would make excuses until finally agreeing to look into it. We paid a lot of money for an amateur job and organization. Several of things in the original design didn't fit and had to be redone, reordered.