Irons Brothers remodeled our kitchen. They finished ON TIME and ON BUDGET. However, these few words don't begin to capture how great it was to work with them.
We had heard so many horror stories of contractors who said they would take a couple weeks and ended up taking months or they estimated a cost and came in way over budget. We knew we did not want that.
We met Joseph and Melissa Irons because their kids go to the same school as ours and I had encountered them through school activities. We didn't have much of a clue what we wanted beyond something open and way better than what we had. They recommended Terence at Luna Kitchen and Bath. He designed an idea and helped us through choosing cabinets, light fixtures, appliances and all the other choices that seemed so overwhelming.
Then we got a schedule that was 13 weeks long. We lived in the house the entire time they remodeled the kitchen. The project included taking down two interior walls, taking out a sliding glass door and replacing it with a new outside wall and window. Each step of the way a specialist came out to do their part. They even custom made siding to match our existing siding and they matched the exterior paint perfectly. The cabinets, counter tops, and appliances are all perfect.
The kitchen was a sort of cube in the corner of the big living room. Now the whole room is open and the entire space feels magical - comfortable, spacious, warm, inviting, well-lit. I'm the type to obsess over a tiny visual detail that isn't quite right and I am having none of that because they did such great finishing work. I waited three weeks after they were done to even decorate the rest of the room because I wanted to have the beauty of the kitchen matched throughout the room (rather than just put all the old stuff back in there).
All of our questions were answered in a timely manner. They even came out on a couple weekends (including Father's Day) to fix silly little problems that we should have been able to figure out but we are house idiots. They were always patient.
Not once, NOT ONCE, did they fall behind schedule. They completed their work exactly on time. The estimate they gave us in the beginning was more than we wanted to spend but we accepted that Seattle is an expensive place to, well, do anything. So it was super important to us that they not go over their estimate. And they did not - in fact, they came in slightly under. On the last day of the schedule, the clean up guy came and I wish he could come to my house every week and clean. It was spotless when he left and I mean the entire room, not just the kitchen. He even washed the windows that are not by the kitchen area.
Before this experience, I would have thought it impossible to make the 13 weeks worth it. We moved our kitchen into the downstairs laundry room and bar area of the family room. It was cramped and a bunch of other unhappy adjectives. Because they were working directly above the laundry room, saw dust kept coming off the ceiling onto the kitchen area. (And yes, when they happened to go downstairs, they were even good about cleaning that up throughout the process). Weeks of frozen dinners and doing dishes in a utility sink, of having lots of strangers in the house all day long, and I can say without any qualifiers, that it was totally worth it.
I only wish we would come into a windfall of money so we could use Irons Brothers again to remodel other parts of the house.... read more