SOUSA'S KITCHEN CABINETS

We signed a contract with Mr. Sousa on 9-24-2016. He told us that work would begin sometime in April, 2017 because he was finishing a big job. He stated that when he began a job, he made your project his only priority. He also said that he could make any style of cabinet door we wanted, which appealed to us. We did our due diligence and checked references and friends had used him for work in the past. We agreed to the delayed start date and paid him a 50% deposit. Work on our kitchen did not actually begin until 7-17-2017. At first, Mr. Sousa came on time and worked a fairly normal day (5-6 hrs with a lunch break). The longer the project went on, he tended to arrive 1-2 hrs. after he said he would be here, would work an hour or two and leave for lunch. Sometimes he came back and worked for another hour or so. He left for the day most days by 3 pm. When he reached the point where he would be working on our cabinet doors, hutch, and entertainment center, he stated that he would be in his workshop and not coming to the house as often. What he did not tell us was that he would disappear for a month at a time. This happened several times and we found out that he was working on a bathroom project for another customer! He even told us that he was going on a "golf vacation" but we also found out that he was not on vacation, but working at the other job. By November 2017, we had to tell him that we could not cook our Thanksgiving dinner without having our tile backsplash installed. Our countertops were installed on 10-12-17, so he had plenty of time to get the tile installed prior to Thanksgiving. We also did not have any cabinet doors or drawer fronts installed until we finally got drawer fronts right before Christmas. (We lived with screws sticking out of our drawers so we could use them from the end of October until mid December.) All along, Mr. Sousa kept saying that he was "working on our doors" but we only had a few installed by the time I confronted him on January 10, 2018. I asked him to tell me honestly, without any of his excuses, to tell me when our project would be finished since it was coming up on 6 months since he began. I was also aware that he had begun a new kitchen project before he finished with ours. He admitted that he was working on the other projects, and said that he would be done with our job in 3 weeks. We did not get all of our cabinet doors and our punch list of items to complete (mostly) until 3-9-2018, (mainly because he told the new kitchen customer that he would be working full time on their job beginning March 12). Our kitchen ceiling was having issues with showing tape lines from where the mudding was done incorrectly by someone that Mr. Sousa hired to mud the drywall that was installed. He left this person unsupervised and the guy clearly had no idea of what he was doing because most of his work had to be redone. He also left his 14 year old grandson unsupervised hanging drywall at one point! After trying to fix the ceiling issues 3 times between March and July 2018, you can still see imperfections. We will say that the custom cabinetry Mr. Sousa completed for us is very nice and the door style is just what we asked for. He complained constantly about how difficult they were to make and that was why it was taking so long to get them finished. We countered that if he wasn't doing 2 other projects during the time that our job was supposed to be his "only priority", they could have been finished much sooner. The final assessment after dealing with Sousa's Kitchens for over 1 year is that the result is a kitchen we really like, but the dishonesty and delays made it a negative experience overall.

From the start, Jim Sousa and his staff were on-time, clean and very professional. My new kitchen is beautiful and the disruption to my home and family during the process was relatively minimal.