Wellington Windows and the Attack of the Ill-Fitting Blinds

Installation day came as promised, about 4-5 weeks past the date of our order. We were scheduled a three-day install, due to the amount of windows we were having installed. My wife got house-sitting duty while the installers were at our home, and I got to hide out at work and call and email for updates.

As I said before, the installers themselves were hard workers and polite. By the end of the first day, they were completely on schedule. That night, though, we ran into our first problem. We had been told that our old blinds would fit into the frames of the new windows. When we tried to install them on the windows they had finished, we found the window frames they installed were too narrow by anywhere between 1/2" to a ful inch. Up until that day (when my wife told me) I had no idea how much a set of window blinds could cost, let alone buying new blinds for every window in our house.

So we called our salesperson, who passed us onto the installer, who said that he didn't doubt the blinds might not fit the frames, but that he would come out the second day and make sure they did. On the second day, he did successfully install one set of blinds by adjusting the frame, and assured us that the rest would fit. That night we discovered that other than the one he did, none of them fit.

So we called our salesperson, who passed us onto the installer (note the pattern, you'll get used to it), who said there was probably a chance that all the installed frames had been measured wrong, and that they would all need to be rebuilt. He was so sure of this, he was going to send the installing crew an entirely new set of lumber to build the new frames to get the blinds to fit. The next day, though, it turned out the extra wood wasn't needed. Using a large hammer and a fair bit of force, they were able to pound all of their frames further in, widening the space to fit the blinds.

So in the end we got the frames we asked for -- ones that fit the blinds we had -- but it took the following effort:

2 initial phone calls to the salesperson
2 return calls from the installer
2 separate visits to return and redo the work they had already completed

This may not seems like a hardship, but remember that we're now only 2 days into the project. So, we were a little bit annoyed, and slightly inconvenienced, but at least they fixed what went wrong. So why all my complaining? Well it turns out the real problems had only just begun.