Sears Fiasco

Sears came out to bid my kitchen remodel. They did not have any sample cabinets, no sample displays, no showrooms. That was the first warning sign. The salesman made me all kinds of promises: you dont have to pay until you are 100% satisfied witht our job, we will stay with you from beginning to end, you have our name and we have been around for 50 years, all our subcontractors work for us, and then. The final warning sign, was his carrot dangle:  if you sign tonight, we will give you $2000.oo towards your project. BTW, one of the first things on their contract says that anything Sears promised you orally is not binding!!!!!

When the materials arrived, Sears installation contractors began to install the kitchen cabinets their contractors made: cut stained, glued and assembled. They dented my refrigerator and installed the cabinets too close together. So they had to come back and move them over all the hanging cabinets consisting of the pantry and around the refrigerator and oven. When they moved them over, they had to recut the holes around the electrical fixtures. Instead of replacing the wood, they simply left gaping holes where their errors in calculation ocurred. Also,the installation was not completed because they did not order everything. They forgot the spice racks that were added to the island and one of the island cabinets was missing and another was not made with pullouts. When the missing pieces came in June, I was out of town.

I was seriously concerned and appalled by Sears’ contractors work. I immediately made a power point presentation with photos and sent it as a CD with all the images of substandard work I was concerned about to the sales supervisor, Eli Gibbons. He ignored this and I had to pursue him doggedly to get him to even acknowledge he had seen the CD. There was no further response by Eli Gibbons about my concerns or complaint accept to “just let their contractors finish the job”.  Sears sent over Fred Aguire and I showed him what I was upset about. Eli promised to work with me and to have Fred fix what he could to accommodate the bad job the contractors did. Fred said he could see my complaint but the most he could do is replace the faces of the smaller top-drawers  with a single piece of wood and replace the inners shelves with real wood. Eli also said I would not have to pay for the oven box. But who wants a kitchen even if it is for free but looks terrible.

I was traveling for work. I would come home sporadically and my roommates and I have been living out of my laundry room sink and microwave for a year. One year from when I signed the contract, I was finally able to get the sales supervisor, Eli Gibbons,  to come view their contractors and go over each complaint. He came with 2 people; Melissa, (it took me months to get Eli Gibbons to give me her full name and who she represented) …Melissa Daigneault – American Cabinetry Collection Representative from Elkaya.. I guess she checks out some or many of the areas of our complaint. She did admit to many of the points we were unhappy with.  Fred Aguire, described by Sears as a “cabinet technician”, came again. Fred also saw some of the problems and admitted to them. This visit and everything said, was witnessed  by my friend a proffessional colleague. Melissa acknowledged the issues and gave excuses like, ” the wood is bowed because the weather caused the wood to expand or contract before, during or after various treatments”,  or “the stain variations give the kitchen character”. The unstained wood underneath is showing because the over wood “expanded with the weather”. She did admit the dado/wood blade cut was very rough and did not look good and should have been cut cleaner. I told them if I had seen a sample cabinet like this, I would never had used Sears. Eli, acknowledged I was never shown a sample and that I had to drive to a shipping yard door to even get a 2 inch W by 3 inch L sample of the wood to try to pick out my granite!

After the visit we waited for a final word on what Sears position would be about the complaint. I was finally told  via an email last week,  by sales supervisor Eli Gibbons,  that Sears would not have their contractors  redo the work. They would not try to do a better job with saw cuts nor attempt to do a better job with more thorough stain application and control temperature variation and nor would they attempt to make boxes that did not bow. I was told they would not upgrade the product even if I paid them more money as they did not feel confident I would be happy with their contractor’s future work.  They insisted said that the product “met their standards” and that I could either accept their contractors work “as is” and Sears would take 15% off, or they would remove everything and keep my $12,000.00 and I could start from scratch with someone new to remodel my kitchen.

1. Sear’s contractors applied their stain in an extremely blotchy, uneven incomplete and unproffesional manner. Every single piece looks like it has one coat sprayed on. One is smudged with hair what appears to be hair.

2. Sear’s contractors failed to apply the stain to the wood underneath criss-cross wood sections; therefore, showing gaps of raw wood underneath that is unsightly, unproffessional and will also not hold up as well to spills in kitchen, etc

3. Sears contractors used damaged wood defective wood/particle board that is bowed and uneven so that none of the shelves fit square to the backs of the cabinet boxes with huge gap variance from one end to the other end

4. Sears contractors use dado/saws that are very large to cut the wood and/or veneer leaving rough seams on the endsthat look extremely unprofessional where all wood/veneers end. They never sand them down!!!!

5. Sears contractors assembled cabinet faces in such a way that each face of my cabinets, whether drawers or an oven cabinet box are composed of from 3 and up to 10 pieces of two-inch wood strips. These small strips are visible with wood going in all different directions. They are then glued tougher to make one drawer or one frame box. I have no problem seeing wood grain, wood grain is beautiful and natural. But I was never informed that Sears approves contractors using drawers made up of  multiple pieces of wood:  3 to 10 different pieces of wood and with grain patterns conflicting in all different directions..sometimes 12 times in one piece. Had I known this, I would NEVER have used Sears.

6. The contractors glued the small wood in a manner that leaves holes, grooves or gaps that look very unprofessional. The front of the shelves has a veneer glued on top of it and the veneer shows rippples, dents and staples in it

7. Sears Contractors used damaged wood, dinged, scratched wood

8. Sears contractors created and make particle board that is already splintered and falling apart and does not look like it will last a year, let alone 20

9. Sears contractors make their boxes using  thin particle board and then STAPLED it to the back the walls. Had I been informed that this was the technique, I would never have gone with Sears

10. Sears contractors, whom I was told were the best, moved the large hanging cabinet over and opted to leave 2 gaping holes in the wood backing up against hte wall that is unprofessional…as if a 5 year old did it

11. Sears used shelf hinges and machinery that were not made of the materials I was told would be used

12. Sears contractors used shelves with shiny veneer glued on the ends with such poor quality, looking extremely unprofessional..you can see staples, ripples and you can actually run your hands up to it and it is higher than the wood itself

13. Sears architect contractor constructed a huge hanging cabinet that does not fit the space and none of the cupboards can be opened without them hitting each other,  hitting the walls and hitting the refrigerator even after they were adjusted and if they install a hinge limiting it still fourth, the drawers will not open enough to clear the pull outs in the pantry

14. Sears gives you drawers that at the face value, look like they will give you more room, but inside, they actually only give you room of 1/2 the size of the drawer face. So dont order lots of drawers thinking you get more storage. The mroe drawers you get the less storage. The top drawers only give you a 2 inch clearance..not even enough to store pot lids…

Sears admitted in front of a dear colleague and friend, they did not offer me anyway to see their contractors work in advance as they do not provide showrooms nor provide sample cabinets. I have text message complaints because I was given no samples to even be able to pick out my granite countertops. All I had to go on was a photograph from a catalogue which I included. That is how I originally was given Eli’s phone number. He finally gave me one 2 inch x 3 inch inch piece of wood as my sole representation of the cabinets. It was of course not big enough to see how the contractors make an entire drawer face, shelf, or back or box. They hid from me all their contractors work and then hoped I would accept substandard work and be stuck because I had already made a deposit. Sears has a page you must sign that says you understand that the samples are NOT representative of a whole door and that their stains are light and natural and you will see the grain. What they did NOT tell you is that each piece of wood you get, is made up of 3-12 tiny pieces of wood glued together and each piece of wood has grains going through it and they groves NOT only do NOT match up, they may be going in totally different directions and be totally differnt patterns and even take the stain different. So it looks like a bad quilt.

After waiting 5 months for a response, I finally got the sales manager to come out with one rep. They came out and concluded that I am not a reasonable customer and that the kitchen Sears gave me meets with their standards!!!!!!!! So now I will ask a judge.

I thought the name Sears meant something… because I grew up with it. Sears means to me NOW: hustlers, con artists, and a massive coorporation that takes advantage of the weak and trusts that you dont have enough money nor energy to fight them and it will just continue to eak out its milllions giving you cheap product by using contractors who probably did not go to good schools and do substandard jobs and use the cheapest parts possible and the simplest short cuts I will here give you a link to my page dedicated to the Sears junk kitchen….Remember when you see this: This kitchen was viewed, not once, but twice, by supervisors and was deemed by the sales manager Eli Gibbons and by the cabinet Rep as “meeting all acceptable standards”!!!!