Cardell Cabinets-The good, the bad, the ugly????

  We have been shopping for cabinets to remodel our kitchen and this has
been an ongoing battle.  We started with Lowe's and likes the
Kraftmaid and Diamond but they were a little pricey and the door and
designs in our price range were pretty lame.  We checked Home Depot
and same thing.  Then we started looking around and stumbled across a
local supplier that carries the Cardell line of kitchen cabinets.

http://www.cardellkitchens.com/

We found a unique design we liked with a rope pattern in the door
design, raised door styles and all wood construction.  Nice solid
looking drawer slides and everything seemed good.  Got the pricing and
in line with the Kraftmaid stuff but a better design.  We tried to
finalize the deal but after several trips all we were getting was a
hand written paper without even the company letterhead in the sheet.
We requested something more definitive but didn't get much help.  We
were told we'd get a spread sheet with everything detailed but that
was two weeks ago and no word.  Hate thinking we have to chaise these
people down to buy stuff from them.

When we got the quotes from Lowe's it was all detailed out with full
descriptions, drawings, terms, conditions, and everything clearly
defined.  We're a little hessitant on dropping around $8K off a hand
written sheet that has a bunch of numbers on it that we don't have
anything to reference to, and with a bunch of prices hand written
beside them.  We're worried if something comes in wrong we'd have
little recourse to get it fixed.

Is this a normal method of buying kitchen cabinets?  Off hand written
sketches?

And has anyone had good/bad experiences with Cardell?  It seems like a
good product line but the ordering methodology seems a little risky.
Do you think it could just be this one dealer?  There is another
dealer only about 10 miles away (actually closer to our home) but when
we attempted to email then from their website we got the email
returned as an invalid address which didn't give us a wamr fuzzy
feeling about them either.

Any and all help would greatly appreciated!

 No experience with Cardell Cabinets out there?  Hmmm, what does that
say  :O/

  infiniteMPG wrote:

Very little other than they're not a Merillat (sp?) or similar.

I'd not heard of them so didn't answer first go-round but looked at
their site this time -- not enough info there (nothing but pictures,
basically) to tell anything at all about construction, materials,
hardware, warranties, etc.

As for the other part of the story, I wouldn't deal w/ that distributor
for any product unless it were someone I knew personally that I could
trust implicitly to follow through and that's how they do business.  I
know several that the description superficially fits--one is absolute
top-notch and first choice; the rest are as scatter-brained in their
work and the rest as is their estimating/pricing/design.

If there's another distributor and you're still interested in the
product and it's only 10 miles why haven't you visited them already is
the only question I'd ask.

--

 
I attempted to email in a request and the email bounced.  I attempted
to send it as a fax and the fax failed.  So I called them today and
their phone is disconnected.  So forget them.

And the dealer with the hand written quote I did notice that they had
FOR SALE signs on their cabinet displays.... what does that say???

I wrote Cardell direct and they said the dealer who is offline has
moved (but their website is still up) but they gave me the name of
another place local (a stone's throw from my work) and I called them,
they gave me email address to send request to and were very
professional on the phone.  Feel more comfortable already  :O)

 Looks like I'm going to clean up the order with the first guy and go
for it.  Got word back from the new vendor and they want almost
$12,000 for what the original guy is charging me under $7,000 for.
Wow.....