Wellington Windows: The Christmas Day Surprise

So we heard the news that the second batch of windows, to replace the first faulty set, would be made before Christmas, right around the third week of December. So we waited. For three more weeks we waited. And surprise, no one called us to say they were done. So we, as always, had to call them. They were done, they told us. When would they be installed, we asked. Probably mid January we were told.

What? Three more weeks? The windows were finished, sitting in a factory somewhere in Minnesota, but they couldn't spare the crew to bring them out until January? So again, rather than get angry with the first person I talked to on the phone, I demanded to speak with someone in charge right away. If we waited until January, we will have waited nearly five months to get our windows. Who did I need to talk to to get this resolved?

I waited an hour for a call back, and then two hours, and then three. Nothing. Finally I called them again. I talked to the first person on the phone who said they couldn't help me. They passed me on to my salesperson, who I already knew couldn't help me. He said someone else would call me back right away. And then another hour passed before I finally got the call.

It turned out the windows were done, but they didn't have any available crews to install them before Christmas. And they were shutting down the plant until after the new year. The soonest possible time to get them in would be the second week in January. No exceptions.

At this point I unloaded a little: Five months of waiting. 100% failure rate. $15,000 and nothing to show for it. No one calls us back. No one tells us what's going on. And the person on the other end of the phone listened, said it was a bad situation, but there was nothing he could do. Either wait to get them installed in January or not get them at all. It was finally at this point that someone at Wellington Windows let us know that it wasn't just us that had bad windows, but every single window they installed for the last six months had similar failures. Someone at the factory had fallen asleep at the switch and the windows hadn't been constructed correctly for months, but no one had caught the error. Lucky us, and lucky everyone else who made the mistake of buying windows from Wellington during that six month period.

So what could we do? If waiting three more weeks meant we would finally get our windows installed properly, once and for all, we would wait. Five months of waiting for one set of well-built windows wasn't too much in the big scheme of things, was it? As we were soon to learn, the second time isn't always the charm.