Here's the good and the bad and the lessons learned from working with Midwest Rock Tops:
The show room is nice and you get 1:1 help while browsing. They let dogs in. You can take home samples, which was really important to me. I felt confident in my decision making when selecting a color.
As a salesperson myself, I would never expect my customers to call me to confirm installation the next day, but I'm so glad I made the call at 4:30pm when I hadn't heard from them. Turns out they dropped the piece of granite I had ordered and it was cracked. Ended up picking an entirely new color the night before, and installation got pushed back an extra day. Not the worst in the world, but no water in your kitchen is a pain. The owner came by that night at 8pm with new color samples, so I appreciate him doing what needed to get done to keep things moving along.
I was told installation would take 2-3 hours. It took 7 hours. Plan accordingly and take the entire day off of work. The owner also told me I could reassembly my kitchen drawers and cabinets prior to installation. I'm SO GLAD I didn't. There is dust and debris everywhere! Not a big deal, just don't tell your customers that there isn't going to be a big mess when there certainly is. So just take all your drawers out and everything out of your cabinets before they install, and save yourself a bunch of work.
Your walls are going to get f***d up. Be prepared. I was expecting a bit of touch up, but not over 2 feet of drywall damage and 6 different areas of walls needing fixing. The owner came out and fixed it up real nice, but also told me 3 times on the phone and 3 times in person "we don't typically do this." Don't make a customer feel bad for asking you to fix your installers gigantic messes.
Sink and faucet installation doesn't really mean sink and faucet installation. They just literally drop the sink in that's attached to the countertop. You pay for countertop installation, but you have to assemble and install your garbage disposal, your faucet, and all your other kitchen plumbing yourself. This cost me another $500. I just wish this had been made more transparent to me. When I see "install" on the quote, I think install. This is certainly a combination of my lack of knowledge and their lack of transparency, but I would always make sure my customers were aware of the full scope of what they were getting into if they were buying my product.
Before signing any quotes or tickets be sure you understand everything on them. For example, on my quote that I signed, the sink was listed as "stainless steel 5050/6050". As a customer, I have absolutely no clue what this meant. To me, I had pointed to the sink I chose in the showroom, and the assistant (Jade) put that in my order. On install day, the first thing they bring in is the wrong sink! In fact, it was the same sink I had just ripped out of my kitchen! This was their mistake, but I also have to take some responsibility to make sure I understand what every "description" means on their quotes. There was no apology for this, but they were able to bring out the correct sink. Whew! It's a good lesson learned for customers to ask exactly what each item means on your quote. I hope for Midwest Rocktops learns from this as well. Perhaps provide pictures on their quotes for customers or be more descriptive rather than a bunch of numbers before the customer is expected to sign off on that?
Even though somebody comes out and measures expect that there will be errors. My 6 inch backsplash was an inch and a half short. They were able to fix it same day but again contributed for the job taking over twice as long is what it was expected to take. Same thing for the corner piece. The corner pieces did not fit together as they should have. And resulted in yet another mistake that had to be fixed.
So, all in all, I don't think I would recommend Midwest Rocktops to anyone, as there's so much competition in the Madison area. I would try another business before going back to them. They're nice enough folks, but there were lots of mistakes made along the way that could have been easily presented. As anyone knows that's done renovations, there's going to be issues, but there were issues every step of the way with Midwest Rocktops. read more