Home depot's prices are a rip off. You can do better.

Anonymous wrote:Who is fabricator to go directly to?

They’re a dime a dozen. Many are small shops located near granite yards in. Chantilly.

Who is fabricator to go directly to?

It’s going to vary depending on the fabricator and installers HD farms it out to. Could be fine. My experience getting work done via HD is the guys were capable ofcompleting the job at a basic level but didn’t have advanced skills. As long as there was nothing tricky about the situation it was sufficient.

How much time?
Looking to do quartz in kitchen completed quickly for listing but needs to be good job. A couple weeks and on tight budget. HD the place to go?

We just finished using HD for our wet bar and laundry room quartz counters. We are delighted with the way they turned out. The installation team was very professional. We are in Potomac and went through the Gaithersburg HD store.

I will say, the only downside was timing. It did take quite a bit of time from start to finish. It was fine because the projects were in places that we didn’t need the counters right away. Doing a kitchen though might be more frustrating. But we love the outcome and the price was great for quartz.

OP. Thanks. We just called HD’s 800 line for customer cabinets. The guy was great. So far so good. He worked up an estimate and told us if we wait until later this week, there will be an additional sale that will save us another 400-500.

I think we’ll go this route, be incredibly specific at every stage, communicate with fabricator a ton, see the slab in person, and take tons of photos/video right before the install, in case something gets damaged or goes wrong.

Really appreciate the feedback - lots of people in our life warning us against big box but it’s hard to justify paying so much more — especially in our location which has a definite cap on ROI. Fingers crossed!

It's hit or miss. Just be sure your "contract" outlines any concerns you have about the work to be done.

They hire day laborers and sporadic handymen to do the install work, but the fabrication of it likely is always done by the same person who is local.

The good thing is box stores have excellent warranties if something goes awry.

I did countertop replacement in my kitchen with HD years ago. It worked well.

I used Home Depot because my contractor was offered a "package" deal from HD for cabinets and countertops. I don't worry too much about what other people think.

I did have to go out to the fabricator and choose my quartz slab, but other than that, I was hands off - the contractor managed the fabricator/installation. It looks great, and I was not aware of any delays.

Like you said, HD is middleman and connects you with their fabricator. Get bids from independent fabricators to see if price is better. My guess HD has good prices because they offer finite choices. If they have what you like, great. If you go directly to fabricator, they’ll likely have many choices as they source from local granite (quartz too) supplier.

do what you can afford

Has anyone gotten quartz countertops from Home Depot? We are doing a kitchen renovation with custom cabinets, and I notice Home Depot offers the exact same quartz countertops — same brand, color, pattern, thickness, everything, I’ve compared samples and asked all the questions — for a fraction of the cost.

Once we sign contract with HD I’d be dealing directly with the fabricator, who gets decent reviews. Biggest complaints seem to be about being late for appointments or last minute cancellation rather than quality of work. I would save *thousands* of dollars.

I realize HD is looked down upon, and people are inherently mistrustful of big box stores (I am too!). So I’m looking for those with actual experience: Did you use HD for custom countertops? How was it?