I was concerned it was too good to be true.
I had serious doubts about hiring Madera Finishes to do my job. The job was to refinish the cabinets in my kitchen and 3 bathrooms. I got several bids from different companies, and Madera was the cheapest by far. In fact, the highest bid was more than double Madera's price! Initially, I was convinced that there was some sort of miscommunication and perhaps Madera was not quoting the work I wanted. I exchanged quite a few emails with them, and I even asked them to come out a second time to discuss the job in more detail.
As it turned out, the job they were quoting was exactly the job I wanted. No miscommunication. Madera was simply much cheaper.
I have a theory about why that might be. Other companies had a slick salesman and a larger bureaucracy to support. Part of their price was for the work itself, but a significant portion of their price was to cover the slick salesman's commission and all the bureaucracy of the company's "front office". With Madera, you're not paying for all that extra overhead. With Madera, you're hiring the craftsman directly. Richard came out to give me the quote, and Richard was also the highly-skilled craftsman who did the work. I feel like with Madera I was truly just paying for the work, not paying for a bunch of extra overhead and salesman's commission. That's my theory about why Madera's price was so much better.
Anyway, I hired Madera, and it turned out to be a great decision. The main guy at Madera is Richard. Richard and his helper did a fantastic job. No complaints!
Richard actually exceeded my expectations in several ways. There were some issues that made our job difficult, and Richard handled everything perfectly. We were doing the kitchen and all 3 bathrooms in the house all at once, so that could potentially be very disruptive. However, because he did such a great job scheduling the work, masking everything off, and cleaning up daily, the whole project turned out to be much less disruptive than I had expected.
Also, right before we hired Madera, we had some custom cabinetry built, which was still bare wood. I was concerned about whether or not the new portion would match the original after it was all stained. Well, Richard knew exactly what he was doing, and everything matches perfectly.
When I was initially doing research for the project, I read that some refinishing places give you the impression that they will sand the cabinets down to bare wood completely, but then they don't actually do it. Sanding everything completely is very time consuming, so some companies cut corners. Perhaps they just sand the cabinets a little, and then put the new stain over the old stain. According to what I read, it will still look fine at first, but you can run into problems later because you have new stain on top of old stain. Anyway, that was not an issue at all with Madera. The frames were sanded completely at my house, and the doors/drawers were sanded completely at Richard's shop. He even sent me pictures of the completely-sanded panels at his shop before he stained them. He was clearly doing high-quality work.
Previously, my cabinets & drawers did not have knobs or handles, but I asked Richard if he could add those. Seems tricky to me, since you need to drill brand new, perfectly straight holes everywhere. And you certainly can't make any mistakes, or you end up with an extra hole in your cabinet! I was concerned, but Richard did a perfect job.
Another issue that made my project difficult was that right in the middle of it all, my wife and I had to go out of town unexpected for 2 weeks. I'm sure that really messed up Richard's schedule, but he handled it beautifully. He juggled things around and seamlessly picked up right where he left off as soon as we got back. We threw him quite a curveball, and I really admire the way he handled it professionally, graciously, and effectively.
I also added some extra work at the end. After getting the soft-close hinges in the kitchen & bathrooms, I decided I wanted soft-close hinges on 3 sets of hall linen cabinets. Richard was happy to do it, and for only a small fee he did a great job. I actually made a mistake that cost him an extra trip. One of the linen cabinets had 3 hinges per door, and I didn't notice. So, I told him to order the wrong number of hinges. When he came out to put them on, he discovered my error. But he was real nice about it. He ordered the additional hinges and made a special trip back out to install them at no extra charge. I would call that "above and beyond".
I have hired a lot of people over the years to do various jobs for me, and it's not very often that I find someone with Richard's integrity, as well as his dedication to quality work and customer satisfaction. Honestly, if I could find something else for him to do, I'd hire him in a heartbeat. And I would definitely recommend him to anyone. read more