My Life Blog

Suzanne and I continue to add refinements to our house — its Extreme Makeover: Married Edition!  So the latest project is getting new countertops.

As we were disappointed by Home Depot in our island installation, we decided to try Lowe’s.  Its too bad for Home Depot since this job was about four times more expensive.  HD’s poor customer service cost them this job and our continued loyalty.  So we were very hopeful that Lowe’s would provide a much better experience.

But we must have the black cloud of home remodeling perpetually hanging over our heads.  This job goes no better.

We are currently on day two without running water in the kitchen after the faucet installation was aborted by the sub-contractor.  His reason?  The faucet we bought was uninstallable due to its shallow mounts.  It seems the combined depth of our countertop and the undermounted sink means there’s no room to thread the connector hoses. 

We were incredulous when the sub-contractor advised us to buy another faucet and Lowe’s seemed to support that advice.  I could not believe we were going to have to spend additional time to pick another out.  But we went to Lowe’s anyway and looked at alternatives.  All had the same "shallow " mount.  So it would seem that the shallow mount is actually standard.  So after failing to find a workable alternative, Lowe’s finally does what they should have done all along and commits to having the sub-contractor "core" out the sink to make additional threading room. 

We are pissed because we spend 1.5 hours at Lowe’s when Lowe’s could have done the right thing saving us the trouble.  And since we returned the faucet upon entry to the store, we had to buy the same damn one on the way out.

There have been other rough spots along the way, but I’ll spare everyone those details.  Suffice it to say that the home improvement industry has a ways to go with their home remodeling services.  I think we are like most customers, we want a smooth, trouble-free experience with no surprises and all work done as advertised. 

As a point of information, the sub-contractor admitted that Lowe’s serves only as the middle man and that they take 30% of the job cost before delegating to their sub-contractors.  Given the amount of value they provide for that 30%, they are surely very profitable with this approach.