It would have been much better to be able to highly recommend this business to family and friends, but as it turned out we are not able to do that. We waited a while before writing this review just to have a cool off period, but as you will read there is not many positive things to say.
We based our decision on the ratings on this website, Angie's list and the Better Business Bureau. We chose Stone Specialties after getting estimates from 2 other reputable companies who were also highly rated, not really based on their price (their price was comparable to the others) but based on a previous pleasant small dealing that we had with them where they cut a granite top for a bookcase for us. Based on that, we chose them over the others. As it turned out it was a very big mistake...
This project was a kitchen and bath remodeling for a rental property at the beach. We were told that they worked Pinellas county and that they had the best experienced cabinet installers, tile installers, electricians, drywall installers, etc. We were told that these people had worked for the company for many years. We were promised that the project would take approximately two weeks, at most 3 weeks allowing for unexpected things.
We had renters coming at the beginning of September and hoped to be able to rent during the month of August once the project was completed. It should have been completed in July. As it turned out there was still things pending when our September renters came in and we lost rental income for the entire month of August.
At first we were sold a cabinet in a color that we later found out did not exist. We found out when we visited the Armstrong cabinet location. By then we had tile picked out to match, etc. but we took it as human error and selected another door in another color and went looking for other tiles, etc.
The next thing that happened once the remodeling started was that we got red-tagged by the city inspector. They did not pull permits as they should have. There was also questions about proper licensing etc. Along with that came lots of unneccesary running around and time lost at work for us. Did we ask if they had pulled permits? No, we didn't... We really didn't know what needed to be done, but they should have. We thought that a reputable company would do what needed to be done. We trusted them and we were wrong...
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