t's been well over a year now and we can finally share our experience we had with Derek Cadiz at HK Custom Cabinets. This guy abandoned our project and walked away with a chunk of our money. Lucky for us, we recently won our case in arbitration and the bond just paid us out the money that was rightfully owed to us. We contracted a kitchen remodel in Oct 2017 and it all went down hill from there. Derek made countless mistakes and engineering errors that led to multiple delays and excuses. Derek's work ethic was non-existent as we constantly had to call him and ask him if he was going to show up that day, he would even ignore us for days at a time. He took an Initial $10,000 deposit from us and $6,000 for material that wasn't even all there upon delivery. In Feb 2018, Derek choose to abandon our project and leave our family with an unfinished custom kitchen, all because we submitted a CSLB claim demanding he commit to a finish date. We couldn't get him to show up so we had no other choice than to start the CSLB process. Clearly his plan was to string us along while he spent our money and eventually leaving us high and dry. It took us multiple interviews/bids from other contractors to finally find someone we trusted and would follow the CSLB guidelines with payment schedules. It cost us over $15,000 to fix and finish what Derek left us with. Our new kitchen contractor got the job done and he got it done right! It took some time to pick up the pieces but all in all the kitchen ended up turning out phenomenal. The CSLB claim process was lengthy but we stayed committed, he didn't respond to one correspondence and didn't bother to show up for arbitration. He didn't pay us back direct so we had to be on top of his bond to pay us out. I know he is a local here in Temecula and walks around acting like he is some class act guy! We fell for that act and realized real quick that DEREK CADIZ was nothing more than a scam artist! If we can take away anything from this experience it would be the knowledge of what NOT to do in the future when it comes to shady contractors. We are aware and knowledgeable of all red flags & CSLB guidelines moving forward with any project. I can only hope Derek Cadiz never comes back into Temecula trying to conduct business. What a nightmare this has been for our family but I can officially say it's over and we won. read more