KMD Interiors

Well, let's start with what went right because there wasn't much. The contractor that she hired to do the kitchen cabinets, paint the walls and the organizing of the kitchen were fantastic. But unfortunately it went down hill from there (and fast!). The general contractor was okay but would probably never use him again. He did not run on schedule and made some big mistakes, like forgetting to order our kitchen sliding glass door, using our garbage as a work space without asking for permission (he moved everything in our garage and piled it into the corner so he could make space for his men to work because they didn't want to work outside because it was drizzling. They broke several things and ruin some decorations we had. They never did reimburse me for anything. As for KMD Interiors and Karen, who was our interior decorator, this was the worst experience I have ever had. We did a overhaul on our house, remodeled the whole kitchen, had it organized, gutted our master bathroom, add a laundry room in the basement, painted 3/4 of the house ( 5 rooms plus the hallways upstairs and down), had the dining room wallpapered, and bought 4 rooms of furniture and decor. Everything was WAY over budget. KMD will give you three choices when it comes to your design expensive, more expensive and really expensive. I even asked about using different companies for the decor (like home goods, target, Joss & Main, Overstock.com, etc..) just to keep within our budget but every time I brought it up she would always only show me options from Pottery Barn and other stores where she got a designer's discount and then doubled her cost and that's what she would charge me. Now we spent $100K on our house so it wasn't like we were going cheap but we did want to stay within the budget on somethings. Now lets talk about all of the mistakes this designer made. First and foremost, she was so far off the timeline that we finally had to ask her to not finish the job, after we were 3 months behind and she hadn't even started on two rooms. We ended up hiring another decorator to finish the job and she was able to pull off a great job within a couple of weeks. Big mistake number one, she ordered the wrong height vanity. We had to replace the beautiful copper sinks (which I had already bought and had installed) in my bathroom because I couldn't reach over them to brush my teeth or wash my wash (I"m 5' 4"), unfortunately she replaced them with sinks that were about 1" smaller and I still can't use my bathroom. I wanted her to replace my whole vanity and wished that I had forced the issue. The other part of that is that Karen wanted me to pay for the new sinks....I refused. Karen also measured our dining room incorrectly for the wallpaper, so the man that she hired to hang the paper couldn't do a proper job. Not only that she recommended a wallpaper that didn't fit our room and it had to be completely taken down and replaced. If she would have told the paper man who was hanging it that we had a bay window then he would have told her that the paper wouldn't work and we could have avoided the whole situation. I talked to the wallpaper man afterwards and he told me that Karen never even paid him to come back out and redo the whole room. How unprofessional. She also had a habit of changing prices. She would tell us something was one price and then when it was time to charge our credit card it also was double of what she told us and then tried to blame her assistant by saying her assistant told us the wrong price. I did put my foot down and make her give us the price she quoted but she wasn't happy. In fact, she didn't like the fact that I wanted to be involved in the process and spoke up when I felt something was wrong or question her about something, especially the timeline, that she started ignoring me and would only talk with my husband or stop by my house when only my husband was there. I even sent her several emails asking her to please only deal with me since I was the one making the final decisions but she refused and would only communicate with my husband, who then would come to me asking why he was getting all of these design emails that he didn't know anything about. I was very much looking forward to my new house (so to speak) and was very excited for the process when I first met Karen, but it didn't take long to turn into a nightmare. She makes a lot of promises but she is not able to keep them. The biggest thing that got me upset, even after all of these other things, was how she always put me off and never had any time for our project because she was too busy helping someone else. To me, there is nothing more frustrating then paying someone a bunch of money to find out that they think you are unimportant because someone else is spending more money then you are. Bottom line, unless you have an unlimited amount of money, Karen and KMD Interiors is not the company for you. She over extends herself, not very good with the details and also has an excuse about why she didn't do something or forgot something. I could keep going about the things that went wrong but I think you get my point!!