A & J from Toronto

We have hired Traian to install our IKEA kitchen based on the stellar reviews; in fact not one was less than 10. All these excellent reviews, are they too good to be true? Unfortunately YES. Our experience with his work and condescending, outright obnoxious attitude was definitely less than stellar (maybe 1 star). To start with, we agreed to pay him $400 + tax for his ‘custom’ design, which was only a slight improvement of the one that we created ourselves using IKEA free on-line tools and presented to him, and to add ‘insult to injury’ we had to ‘chase’ after him to get the design completed which took almost four days. Finally with the design completed and his shopping list we ordered our kitchen from IKEA. Our own contractor removed old kitchen and prepared the space for Traian to install the new kitchen cabinets based on his own specifications. The estimate for installation of the all the cabinets was two to two and a half days maximum. Well three days came and went and kitchen cabinets were not finished. It took another two days to get there while Traian kept coming late, disappearing, and in between his frequent smoke breaks, we were not even sure that the job would get done. It was essential that the installation would be completed so all the other work, such as plumbing, painting, electrical, etc. would be finished before we left on our trip as Traian was well aware of this deadline. Our experience throughout this process exposed us to Traian’s temper tantrums and rude behaviour that should be unacceptable. In the end we were left with a broken, unstable cabinet that he damaged stepping on it and tried to cover this up. Incidentally this was the only cabinet that he unnecessarily customized and neglected to tell us that no IKEA shelf would fit in it. On top of it we discovered severely damaged glass shelf that he installed but never mentioned anything. We have called him immediately and asked him to fix the broken cabinet. He tried to brush it off by saying that once the granite would be installed the broken rails would not be a problem. (?) We did not accept this and asked him to fix it before the counter gets installed, which he reluctantly agreed to, but we have not seen or heard back from him since. In a nutshell, all these great reviews are either ’paid announcements’ or else we dealt with Traian’s ‘evil twin brother’, in any case we would not recommend him to anyone that is for sure. Very disappointed