That is a mistake. She will take care of this at no charge to you. She will probably order skins to be applied before you hang your hood. She should cover the labor to do this...or have someone put them on for you.

Agree with above post. It's a mistake. My cabs on either side of hood are finished. I am concerned that your contractor installed them with exposed unfinished sides. He should have brought this error to your attention so it could be fixed before going ahead and installing.

Thanks. Bit of an update: I mentioned the issue to the lead carpenter (we're using a design-build firm so the KD and the builders all work for the same company). He said he'd call the KD and ask her about it. When I got back from picking up my DD at school, he was busy taking the uppers down again and obviously in a foul mood about it (gone from whistling to cursing under his breath).

No one's said anything to me, though :-/. Guess I'll find out tomorrow what the solution is.

Wonder why HE was grumbling--did he really think that was okay when he installed it? :P

Very interesting... We just had a high end brand of cabinetry with a painted finish installed - Plain & Fancy.

The cabinet that was first installed over the hood only had an opening for the hood measuring 27 inches. KD claimed it was the manufacturer's error and ordered a replacement. The thing is, that cabinet had perfectly finished undersides that matched our cabinet finish.

When the new cabinet arrived it was not finished underneath at all - open showing unfinished wood. We had to ask KD to have our contractor finish it when he came to complete the job this week.

The result is a patchwork of finishes under the cabinets flanking the hood cabs. It is cobbled together with totally unfinished edge pieces, triangles of painted pieces and some wood pieces that look like the cab interiors. You can even feel nails poking through the bottom of some pieces. We had nicer finishes under our old builder-grade cabinets..

When I questioned the contractor why it wasn't finished painted wood that matched our cabs he said that those only came with the cabinets "with glass" and the other cabs were only finished on the underside with plain wood.

We have had such a nightmare experience with our KD/installation that we are not inclined to fight this. But I know Kompy is an experienced KD and it galls me to think this should have been done without having to beg for it, and done better.

Well, hopefully all learned from this mistake, carpenter and KD. I know that I felt really bad when I did that! But, it didn't happen again. ;~)

Further update: DH and I went to take another look after putting the kids to bed this evening. One of the cabinets is still mounted with the unfinished side showing, but the other is now uninstalled, and we could see that it *does* have one finished side - with several drill holes through it. I'm sure that when I saw everything installed both exposed ends were unfinished. So now we're wondering if the carpenter installed the boxes upside down, with the finished ends facing away from the hood rather than towards it. If so, I can see why he was cursing to himself.

Will find out tomorrow, at any rate.

This post was edited by Flying_C on Thu, Dec 4, 14 at 19:38

Well, the resolution is that they're going to order skins to cover the exposed sides just like kompy said. However, no one's told me what the actual problem was - whether the KD ordered wrong or the carpenter installed the cabs upside down.

Is it okay if some of the wall cabs are installed upside down? They're frameless, in case that matters.

Thanks again.