Kc Granite & Cabinetry

This will be a relatively long review, so here’s the TL;DR version: Our kitchen looks great, but it took an ungodly amount of stress and time to get it that way.
My story started at the beginning of June. My wife and I own an old bungalow in the Brookside area, and KC Granite sounded quite excited to be working on such a home. They showed up promptly, gave us a very reasonable estimate on the spot, and we hired them. We figured the biggest part of our kitchen remodel was in good hands.
Their team showed up as promised on the appointed date, removed our existing heinous 60’s countertops, backsplash, and sink. The next day, they showed up again to install our new granite counters and our sink basin. The plumbing was installed a day or two after that. Everything looked great, and the plan was moving along smoothly.
After that, the timeline is important but gets a bit hazy since it was a few months ago, as of this writing. Anyway, on bidding our job, we were told we needed 28 sq. ft. of backsplash material. KC Granite does have a limited supply of backsplash tile and stone available, but we weren’t particularly thrilled with any of it and opted to get our own. To be safe, we ordered 40 sq ft. When the tile team, which KC Granite had subcontracted with, came out, they called my wife and informed her that we were well short of how much tile we needed. That hang-​up was seriously annoying, to say the least, but given that they did an excellent job, we were willing to slog through another week of a dysfunctional kitchen while another tile shipment came in. We set up another appointment with the tile guys to come back out after the extra backsplash tile arrived, and we waited.
That’s when everything went to hell. We were informed that it would be an additional $ 150 to install the extra backsplash due to the larger-​than-​expected square footage. Whether that arose from a misunderstanding during the bidding process or a slick move on KC Granite’s part is debatable. In any event, the tile guy («TTG,» from now on) didn’t show up when he was supposed to. I should mention that my wife and I work a lot and are essentially gone every day from at least 6 – 5 with basically no option to take time off, so when we do have a rare weekday off (like the one she had planned for on that particular day), it’s pretty important to not waste it. She called TTG, and he literally said that he had simply forgotten to come out. When pressed to come finish the job that afternoon, he declined, informing my wife that it was his birthday, and he had been hoping to have the afternoon and evening off. This was on a Thursday, and he promised to be at our place on Saturday.
TTG did, in fact, show up that Saturday. However, he was well over an hour late (again with the punctuality importance as above) and clearly had a raging hangover. After vomiting in our lawn a couple times — yes, really — he set to finishing up our backsplash. My wife was in the basement painting our kitchen cabinets and then had to leave for a meeting or something and didn’t have time to inspect his work. When I got home later that day, I was dismayed to find multiple crooked tiles bent all over the place, large gaps between rows of tiles as wide as ½ inch in places, rows of tiles misaligned with adjacent rows, and just generally awful workmanship. If I wanted my backsplash to look like shit, I would’ve put it up myself!
We got on the horn with TTG (who became increasingly difficult to contact as time went on) and the tile manager at KC Granite immediately to arrange for a fix. I feel like the tile manager was on our side, but given that it took another 2 weeks of hassling with this issue to get someone to come out and fix it, it was hard for me to tell if he was really lighting a fire under TTG. Ultimately, after another no-​call, no-​show from TTG, another of their contractors came out to set things right, and it took him all of 2 days to do so.
The finished product of all that stress is quite nice and exactly what we were hoping for, frankly. It’s just a damn shame that we had such a prolonged speed bump in our backsplash application. That really ruined our experience. I think I would use KC Granite again, but despite the convenience of having one entity deal with all of the tile and stone work at once, I would be very hesitant to have them put in backsplash or tile again, due to all the subcontracting difficulties we had. Stick with the services they don’t have to farm out, namely granite and sinks. It was a rough go with KC Granite and Cabinetry, but they really did do quality work. Again, I hesitantly recommend their services, but buyer beware of anything non-​granite.