North County Design Center

I stopped in the Design Center and talked to their design manager, Toni, about installing a backsplash in the kitchen. I took some samples home and returned them the next day with my choice. We agreed to have someone come out and measure the area. The person was supposed to be there in the morning at 10 and eventually showed up at 4 PM. He took all the measurements .......and I never heard from them again. I know I Could have called and asked what the problem was - but I was irritated by the lost day of waiting for the measurement guy to begin with. I felt that they should have followed up with me.

They killed our dog. In spite of their relatively high price for the job, we selected North County because a) they assured us a "white glove" experience using only their team of in-house employees (no subcontractors), and b) their designer, Toni, did an excellent job in helping us design a kitchen and bathroom experience that we were very pleased with. North County also assured us a short completion time for the project: no later than July 1, 2010. When work began on the project on April 15, 2010, the team who they sent to do the majority of the work on the project turned out to be recently hired subcontractors for North County who had, until that point, been working for Home Depot. If we wanted Home Depot quality, we would have gone with Home Depot. North County had recently taken on a number of jobs and was unable to commit in-house employees to our renovation. We let the renovation proceed, as we were assured that the team selected to do the work in our home would be meet North County's "high standards." Once demolition ended and the installation of bathroom materials began, we began to see numerous problems with the grouting for the tiles in the bathtub/shower area. The grout ultimately had to be replaced not once, but _three_ times in the guest bathroom. Wall tiles were installed crooked, and had to be fixed numerous times (often with the same piece of tile replaced). Floor tiles and the sealant around the bathtub had to be fixed repeatedly. This continued in to the master bathroom, where we had continued grout and tile problems. One of the contractors, assigned to install soap shelves in the master bathroom, when discussing the crooked installation of one of those soap shelves, went so far as to say "I don't like it either, but there's really nothing I can do." An odd statement given that the bathroom was gutted, and their team was responsible for reinstalling everything from a clean slate. We contacted the owner of the company, with whom we had signed the contract, and asked him to come out to the house to see the work. He was very displeased by the quality of the work being done (despite earlier assurances that this team would meet North County's standards). He told us that he would "take care of the problem." The lead contractor on the project returned to our home that afternoon and told us that the individual responsible for the grouting and other problematic work in the bathrooms would be fired. He also informed us that said individual had been drinking on the job, and that was part of the problem. That explained why the liquor in our home had been disappearing at a rate much faster than I, the sole drinker in our home, had been consuming the alcohol. This was the Friday before Memorial Day. We were shocked, then, when on the next working day, the day after Labor Day, the individual who was supposed to have been fired showed up at our home at 10am and proceeded to get to work. We called the lead contractor on the job, demanding to know what was going on, and he told us that he was on his way over to our home to actually fire his co-worker. He explained that he did not want to fire his co-worker at the start of a holiday weekend. Less than an hour later, our dog was dead. Our 19 year-old miniature poodle was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and was the victim of a grizzly accident. We had been instructed to keep the dogs away from the contractors, which we had done throughout the process. This was for their own safety. The miniature poodle, mostly blind and completely deaf, was asleep in a room near where the contractor was working. My partner left the room where the dog was to briefly attend to a chore upstairs. A couple of minutes later, he heard a loud bang and then the contractor began to yell. When he ran downstairs, he saw our miniature poodle, its skull crushed, lying in a pool of its own blood, still alive, twitching and kicking in an autonomic response to its brain being damaged. The contractor said that the miniature poodle -- who weighed less than 9 pounds -- had walked in to the room where he was working, and had walked in to a 35+ pound wall cabinet that was propped up nearby and the force of the 9 pound miniature poodle knocked over the wall cabinet. Clearly a lie, the contractor eventually relented when pressed by my partner about the issue and the contractor admitted that he had accidentally knocked over the cabinet and our 19 year-old dog was in the exact wrong place at the exact wrong time and had his skull crushed by the falling cabinet. Our dog died about 5 minutes later, when most of the blood in his body had been pumped out of his crushed skull. (As a result of this incident, my partner suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. Ending up being covered in blood as you hold your 19 year-old dog as he bleeds out and dies in your arms has a tendency to do that to you. Because he suffered from PTSD, he was out of work for nearly four months while under the care of a psychiatrist. The additional medical and personal financial costs resulting from this incident were not trivial.) When the owner of the company came to our house that evening, he was sincerely apologetic. He was at a loss to explain why the contractor was not fired when he was supposed to have been fired. He understood that while this was an accident, if the contractor was fired as he was supposed to have been fired, our dog would still be alive. The owner of the company asked if there was anything they could do, if we were considering getting another dog, and that they would gladly help with the cost of a new dog. We told him that we did not want another dog, and that their money was not needed. What we said was "Here's what you can do for us. You can finish this job, and finish it flawlessly. Not just finish it well, but flawlessly. Make us completely happy with the work that you do and get it done on time. That's what you can do for us." The owner of the company assured us that this is exactly what would happen. Of course, that's not what happened at all. While they did bring in someone else to repair the grouting and sealing issues in the bathrooms, work proceeded at a slow pace. The original deadline of July 1 came and went, and work dragged on until the beginning of October. Wrong cabinets had been ordered, cabinets that were supposed to have glass fronts did not, cabinets arrived damaged and it took 4-6 weeks for replacement parts to arrive at our home, the contractors assigned to our job had other projects to work on, so they began to work at our home less and less, dragging the process out further. The subcontractors they had hired were working much more time at our home than what they had originally bid to work, so they resisted returning to our home to do work. The tile specialist they brought in to install the tile on the kitchen floor and backsplash did a fine job on the floor (although they didn't order enough tile for him to finish the job the first time in a 16'x16' kitchen, and there was a week and a half delay in getting the rest of the tile in). However, he was also assigned to do the backsplash and he had never tiled a backsplash before. So he used floor putty instead of wall putty, and most of the backsplash tile went up crooked. Fortunately, they sent one of their in-house employees to finish the job, who pointed out to us all the problems with the backsplash and the putty used. Because North County didn't order enough backsplash the first time around, he had to return a total of four times to finish that part of the job. The backsplash still does not line up correctly in a handful of places, even with the job being done. We continued to have issues with the sealing around the bathtub in both bathrooms until the end of the project, some of it being replaced three or four times, and we just recently have found that sealant around the master bathtub has come loose again. Given all the problems we had with the quality of work along the way, we're concerned that we're going to have future problems with the tiling, or the new plumbing joints, or any of the other work that they did. The icing on this bitter cake is that communication deteriorated throughout the process. After our dog was killed, North County assigned a project manager to our project who did not care to manage our project, who often ordered the wrong items when items were needed for our project, and did not get along with the lead contractor on our project. By the time September rolled around, the project manager from North County refused to speak to the lead contractor on our project and had us, the clients, act as an intermediary. We were all, apparently, back in elementary school. The owner of the company never once returned any of our calls after our dog was killed, dispatching instead this project manager to deal with us, and he, in turn, wouldn't speak to the lead contractor. So much for finishing the job flawlessly. The one minor saving grace in this experience was the designer at North County, Toni. She often was the only one who would return our calls. She took it upon herself to make sure that the correct items were ordered when others would not. The design she created for us looked great, and she helped us purchase materials that were professional and elegant. We also really liked the electrician they had work on our home, whose attention to detail was excellent, and who did a number of little extra things for us because he both cared about the quality of his work and couldn't believe how we were being treated by North County. The project was completed at the start of October, three months late. The final product looked good, although it came at way too high a cost.

They seemed to do everything on time and they did it well. They were relatively new in business when we dealt with them, now they have grown and expanded which means that they are doing well. I didn't compare the price with other companies but it seemed reasonable at that time.