After suffering through a five month project costing us $85,000; yet riddled with what we feel is gross negligence, incompetence and misconduct; it seems appropriate to file a complaint against contractor ?New Look Kitchen & Bath? at 322 N. Royal Ave. Front Royal, VA 22630 asking DPOR to investigate this business and take appropriate action to protect the public in the future.
Kelley presents herself as the ?founder? with 20-32 years of experience [depending on the day]. It is obvious from the volume and severity of problems we experienced throughout our project that this is untrue. The DPOR license lookup illustrates Delores M Young founded this sole proprietor business awarded a Class ?B? license number 2705017653 on 11/30/1992, expiring on 11/30/2000. A subsequent class ?A? license 2705059310 issued to ?New Look Kitchen and Bath? now a corporation, on 11/08/2000 set to expire 11/30/2014. When using the online license look up, no results are returned for ?Kelley Miller?. Considering these facts, there are already 2 lies uncovered ? Kelley Miller is NOT the founder and at best case this
business has held a contractor?s license for 22 years, not the 32 she often claims.
Our project was quoted in January 2014 and estimated to take 4-6 weeks, it has run 2 months over as a result of inadequate
materials management, staffing and numerous tasks having to be corrected multiple times. All issues that could have been easily avoided by an experienced business. Here is a summary of what happened:
Misconduct/misrepresentation:
The above statement regarding founding, years of experience. Interestingly enough, this is a family run business; a fact hidden from their customers. Office Manager is Arrissa (Kelley?s daughter) and Brandon the lead carpenter (Kelley?s son).
We recently learned this detail via ?a slip? on Brandon?s part. He asked if we felt lied to afterwards; seemingly remorseful that he had withheld that information.
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NLKB has posted photos of our project on Houzz.com and Pinterest that are not accurate reflections of their work. The photos have been cropped to remove unfinished areas that took months of arguing to get addressed and these photos certainly
don?t contain disclaimers regarding the number of attempts it took NLKB. Worst of all, there are photos of projects that my husband and I completed with zero assistance from NLKB that they are trying to pass off as ?their work?. We've asked Kelley 3x to remove all pictures of our job (and our name) as we can't recommend her business after the amount and severity of issues we've had along the way; yet NKLB continues to use these unauthorized photos.
Kelley and Brandon often referred to ?the contract? as a point of reference as you should. Our contract says "Adams
Casing" would be installed around all doors and windows; however we later learned from an outside source that "beaded casing" was installed in our home; it's inferior in quality and lower priced. No one from NLKB ever discussed this change with us nor offered a price adjustment. After repeated inquiries on our part, Kelley finally stated that she "couldn't get Adams casing and just installed what she could get figuring we?d never know the difference.?
Gross Negligence/incompetence:
This was a very large and expensive job, yet Kelley Miller never called to ask us how things were going, what our thoughts were regarding the work etc. Not once. She only came to the job site for the initial walk through, at points where we threatened to fire
her and get a lawyer, or to collect payment. Despite the fact that the ?Lead Carpenter? Brandon had never run a project of this size/scope he worked unsupervised for 5 months.
The turnover rate of employees on this job was approximately 73%. A mature business should have quality tradesmen lined up at their ready. We experienced a constant string of new employees/strangers coming in and out of our home for the duration of this project; another reason why the quality of work was so poor. Numerous trades on site stated that Kelley was behind in paying her workers which is why there was such difficulty in getting workmen to come to the site. Ironically, we paid NLKB $85,000 from January to April.
This business could not get the appropriate material, in the right quantity, on the right truck to save their lives. On many occasions work was held up for hours while a tradesman sat here waiting for supplies; sometimes the delay extended days because of materials issues. Several times a crew member made a special trip from Front Royal to Shenandoah (86 miles round trip) to bring something as small as a faucet.
We had trouble with every job performed by almost every trade: ·
Drywall
? started, then delayed 2 weeks because the crew showed up at noon, took lunch and figured out late that they were short one box of screws. Not joking.
The lead carpenter couldn?t figure out how to finish a housing around a ceiling fan so he left it for weeks in hopes that we would finish the work.
Molding
- crown, window/ door casing and base. Started by Brandon, held up because adequate quantities were not on the truck when needed. We were later told that there was a "Back-order" while we learned by making a call to the distributor that basically any molding in any quantity was available any day of the week at their mill. There is also the issue with the quote and swap detailed above.
We were promised ?Custom size/framed bathroom mirrors" which turned out looking like a kindergarten artwork project.
After weeks of arguing, NKLB took the mirror down and patched the drywall. 20-30 years of experience and couldn't pull
off installing a MIRROR?
Plumbing: Not his fault, guy sat around literally for 1/2 day because the fixtures weren?t on the truck the day he was supposed to install them. His fault, our kitchen sink leaked enough water to fill the underside of our new cabinet due to the stress on the joint. Most importantly, and horrifying our new JennAir range required gas to LP conversion. After NLKB "installed" it, the stove didn't work right. We called JennAir service, and were told not to use the range because it was dangerous. We (on our own effort and dime) hired a certified JennAir installer to fix the issue because Kelley didn?t want to ?pay someone else?. The certified JennAir installer found that NLKB had jetted the stove wrong, and used blue painters tape to hold things in place. You'd think that a KITCHEN business with this many years of experience would have installed a high end range before.
Tile
- Master shower mud set floor sloped toward the wall and not the drain. Had to be pulled out and redone. This worker expressed sorrow for the error and wanted to fix it for us. BUT this guy didn?t want to work for Kelley because she hadn?t
paid him for his work that he performed at our home 2 months prior. He explained that Kelley told him he better
come fix the shower because we were withholding $4,000 due to his mistake. We explained that that wasn?t true, and we showed him the list of payments we made to NLKB over the prior months.
Kelley then sprang on this man that it was now