Painted kitchen, kitchen cabinets, great room, and stairway/hallway.
Where do I begin? It's been over a month since this work was done and we're still dealing with the aftermath. I am struggling to resolve all the glowing reviews of Nu Hue with our notably subpar experience. First off, here is what went well. We got several quotes and Nick stood out during the process as knowledgeable and professional, and their price, though not the lowest, was fair and compared well to others. Scheduling was not a problem, and we were pleased that they could perform the job with our kitchen cabinet contents remaining in place. The paint job on the great room and stairways was well done; no complaints there. Nick was friendly, responsive, and professional throughout the process. Now for all the challenges: first off, we had replaced all of our bright white trim with alabaster. One entire section of trim in our great room was unpainted. And for several other sections of trim there were numerous spots where too much paint was used and drops of paint had flowed down and dried. Second, there were numerous problems with the cabinets. Ours are oak, which was a lot used by builders in the late 90's when our house was built, and is not an uncommon wood to be faced with in painting. Nick tried to use a lacquer spray process to paint them. Oak, we found out afterwards, tends to soak up thin paint--a fact Nick should've been aware of and prepared to deal with. His team remounted the doors and tried to call the job done. However, there were streaks of grain showing through and the coat of paint was not smooth. The crew came back out and applied another lacquer coat, which did not resolve the problems. After several weeks of back and forth, including us giving him a door to take and figure out how to properly paint, we ended up giving up on Nu Hue. My wife thankfully is good painter herself, so she has been hand-painting a final layer on the cabinets with a thicker, non-lacquer coat, which has covered the streaks and grainy appearance. Next, Nu Hue?s crew cracked the face of one of the cabinet drawers. There was one mounting screw for a cabinet door that was stripped and left half-way unscrewed, with several cracks in the wood frame (to be fair, some of this last damage admittedly may have been there from the original builders, but I can?t fathom them not fixing the stripped screw and making sure the cabinet door was securely mounted). It appears he has folks on his crew that don?t know how to use a powered screwdriver without damaging the wood. Last and most expensive, we discovered weeks afterwards that the very large custom window in our great room was cracked. This window is 15 feet in the air and the window replacement company said it appeared it was broken from the inside. We also see smudges on it from apparently where someone leaned or fell against it; we have nothing definitive but it is hard not to conclude that they broke the window. And since his crew member didn?t fess up, we now are in the awkward position of having to call them out on it. We are out $900 in repairs for the window alone, never mind the hours of work we had to personally put in to get satisfactory results on everything else. . Update from 12/10/15: Nick reached out to us following our original review. As he accurately notes, he takes his professional reputation very seriously, as well as the quality of work delivered by his company, and having satisfied customers. We were not necessarily interested in having Nu Hue return on site to perform further work on this particular job, but he did compensate us in a more than fair way for time and part of the damages (he offered to completely pay for the window but we settled on a partial amount due to the lack of clarity about exactly what happened). I cannot say whether I would be 100% comfortable about using them again in the future, but can say without any reservation that he takes complaints very seriously and is committed make amends on any problems, which speaks highly of his professionalism and responsiveness.
Service Provider Response
Hi this is Nick LeClair and I am the owner of Nu Hue Company. I apologize for the issues we had with your project, and we will do anything we can to correct the problems. We strive to ensure each home owner has a pleasant experience with our staff and our work. After the work was complete we did do a walk through with one of the home owners to do any touch ups which we did have some, obviously we missed some by your comments. We would be more than happy to come back and fix any issues, and since you have paid we would like to take care of those right away. As for your cabinets we did have some irregular issues getting a proper finish. Our typical system includes 1 coat of primer and 2 top coats. With your cabinets we applied 1 coat of primer and then one top coat and noticed we were having yellow staining bleeding through. We then applied two coats of a stain blocking primer recommended by Sherwin-Williams in which it didn't work. They recommended using another primer which did work, then we followed that up with two final top coats. All of this was at no additional cost to you, we were just trying to make things right. After we re-installed the cabinets everything seemed to be fine, and we collected the payment for the whole project. It was a few weeks after we were contacted by the home owner asking to fix the wood grain issues which we were more than happy to fix. There was a delay getting back to you to setup the repaint, which I apologize for. During this time it was found out that there was a crack in the window. As for the window, no one on our team was aware if the damage was there before or if we did break the window. We are not looking to argue about who broke the window but would like to offer compensation for your troubles. We would like you to know we are addressing your comments and feedback by having a training session to better improve our systems in order to avoid these issues in the future. We take our reputation seriously and appreciate the feedback on your project. I hope you can give us another chance at earning your business in the future. Thank you, Nick LeClair
