What You Should Expect From A Showroom

Making the decision to remodel your kitchen, bath or any other part of your home is huge. It's fraught with anxiety and unknowns. A professional showroom's role is to ease the fear and eliminate stress. That's why it is important to understand that a professional showroom offers more than cabinets, countertops and appliances. A professional showroom is in the business of providing peace of mind.

How can you differentiate one showroom from another? Develop a checklist of information that a showroom needs to offer to help ensure peace of mind. You should expect a showroom to provide the following information:

Schedule: An excellent showroom will not only relate the anticipated start and end dates but the sequencing of construction. Scheduling is particularly important for kitchens and baths because of the lead times required for different products such as custom and semi-custom cabinets and specialty finished fixtures.

The team: The schedule also should identify which different trade professionals will be in your home and the timeframe for their arrival and departure.

Protecting your home: Showrooms should tell you who will lock up your home at the end of the day and how they are going to protect the space. This may include a dust prevention plan and identifying paintings, valuables and other items that may have to be removed from adjacent walls to protect them from potential damage.

Level of involvement and communication: You should expect a showroom to ask you how much you want to be involved in the project. You should identify the decisions that you want to be involved with such as how you'd like tile to be placed or approving lighting location before the space is wired. Your showroom team should also determine the best time and methodology for communicating with you if questions need to be answered or problems need to be addressed during the day and after hours.

Showroom concerns: Your showroom should identify concerns that it has before a project begins. Showrooms have designed and built hundreds if not thousands of new kitchens. They understand that on every project there is a potential for the unknown. To reduce anxiety and potential stress, expect your showroom to discuss the areas of concern it has before demolition begins.

Handling change orders: The procedure for handling change orders should be agreed upon before a project begins. Change orders are the result of a change in plans or uncovering the unexpected. Often times change orders occur because the existing infrastructure of the home does not meet current code requirements. How the changes are communicated and agreed upon should be part of the planning process.

Documentation that you should expect: At the end of the project, you should receive all warranties on the products that you have purchased and installed, a set of final as-built plans, certificate of occupancy if required for the project, operation manuals for all products and a guideline for caring and maintaining your new space.

If you have other questions that you would like to have answered before undertaking your renovation project, please call us at 513-271-3490 or visit one of our two showrooms.