L & M Custom Cabinets

Newly built and installed cabinets and peninsula don't match up with existing cabinets. Cabinet doors don't line up. Several of the cabinet doors warped within a week of installation. No all the screws were used on the hinges, two of the doors fell off shortly after installation. Poor job all around. See photos at www.badhomerenovations.com

Everything was delivered and installed not only unpainted, but unsanded. After the contractor painted everything and the finish was horrible, there was a dispute about why everything was delivered this way. It's possible the contractor ordered the cabinets this way, but the guys doing the painting said everything was so rough it could not be painted properly. Several of the cabinet doors were warped, Mark Beck (the owner of L&M) kept saying hinge adjustments would straighten them out. He made a few adjustments but things seemed to keep getting worse. After a couple of weeks of the contractor trying to paint the cabinet doors, then trying to sand the paint off and start over by sanding, priming and then painting, Mark said there was no way his "good" doors could be made right. He said he would cut us a great deal if we would bypass the contractor and purchase a new set of cabinet doors directly from him and that he would deliver them finished, ready to install. He would sand, prime and paint them at his shop and they would be of excellent quality. He showed us a sample of what the quality would be. So we purchased another set of doors from him. When the second set of cabinet doors showed up, the finish on them was poor. Some of the edges show wood, there are streaks in the flat surfaces, paint is scuffed off several of the visible edges. They didn't look anything like the sample he showed us at the time we purchased the doors from him. He could never get the cabinet doors to look square. He said they just needed to be adjusted, but I've measured them and where there are two doors one above the other, they are 3/8" difference in width. In fact, we now have a kitchen full of badly finished doors, 1/3 of the doors are noticeably warped and there are no square lines anywhere in the place. I would be embarassed to have these in my hunting camp, let alone my residence. Mark was in about 5 times after the final installation to "adjust" things, the last time offering to take the doors down, sand and repaint them in our driveway, etc. We told him we couldn't stand him tinkering with them anymore. He kept saying "everyone sees different things -- I will make this right". But we have decided if a cabinet maker can't see unpainted corners, can't measure stacked doors to be the same size and doesn't notice any of these problems, we need to have someone else do the work. Which we are going to have to do. Other cabinet makers we have had in to quote on fixing L&M's poor work have also pointed out to us that the new cabinets don't match the existing cabinets in several ways. The new peninsula's trim is 4" above the floor, it joins to existing cabinets whose trim is 5 1/2" above the floor. It's hard to make those look like they match. Where L&M added cabinets above our existing cabinets, the sizes of the new cabinets (not the doors, the openings in the cabinets) are 1/4" to 3/8" different from the cabinet openings below them. It's going to be hard to make new doors look lined up if the cabinet openings themselves don't line up, isn't it? The new drawer in the peninsula L&M made has an inch worth of shims on the inside of it to fit the slide mechanism. Somehow the drawer L&M made to fit their own cabinet was and inch too small, even. The whole job was just miserable. I can't tell you how often we have just wished we had the original doors back on our original cabinets. They were 20 years old, but they were square and they all fit better than all the new work from L&M does.