I think this officially makes me an adult…I am beyond excited about my new Wallside windows! When we bought our house 10 years ago, we only planned to stay in in five years. Unfortunately, like many homeowners, we lost a TON of money on our house. Sure the market is slowly going up, but at this point, I’d rather stay in this until Bella is done with high school. We are in a good district and I’d hate to move them.
So staying in this house means we have to slowly upgrade things. One of the things we should have done 10 years ago, shoot, the previous owner should have done it well before she sold the house, is buy new windows. The old windows on our house were the builder installed windows…windows that were installed in 1979. They leaked air like crazy. You could be standing back from the window and feel the cold air coming through. If you stood in the right spot in my bedroom, you used to be able to feel a draft going straight across the room.
Wallside windows was running a deal…buy one window, get one window free. Since it is winter, I would much rather get my windows installed now than in the summer. The idea of having all the windows pulled off the house so bees can come in, freak me out. So we called, set up a consultation, signed the contract and Wallside windows came out last weekend to install. I sent the kids to my parents house. With it being so cold out, I knew the house was going to get cold…and boy did it get cold! At one point I had so many layers on, all you could see were my eyes!
I have a t-shirt and another hoodie under that one!
Here are my thoughts on the entire process…
The Sales Call
I was a little leery about having a sales person come to the house. I’ve never had a Wallside Windows sales person come to my door, but other companies have and they are extremely pushy and don’t take no for an answer. We had one guy come to the door and I told him that my husband makes those decisions and that he was at work. The guy asked for a name and number to call to set up a time with my husband, so I told him his name was John Doe and our number was (555)555-1234. He never called. We also never had another door to door salesman from that company again.
However, the sales call with Wallside was great. I instantly liked our salesperson and he was not pushy, he didn’t try to give us the whole sales spiel…shoot, we both had been living in Michigan our entire lives, we’ve seen the Wallside Windows commercials…we know the company. So he got to work measuring and then gave us our quote. We took the quote, negotiated a bit and signed the contract.
The Install
A couple days after signing the contract, someone from Wallside called us and set up the date for the install. Two days before the install, we received a reminder postcard in the mail. On that postcard it said that the crew would call us the DAY OF to tell us what time they will be there. That part irritated me a bit. I feel that when you are spending thousands of dollars on something, they can give you a call the night before and say “hey we will be there between this time and this time to get started”. If something were to happen the morning of, they can then call and readjust the time or reschedule. They called us about 25-30 minutes before they were planning on being there. It was 7:30 in the morning.
The crew was nice and I was very impressed with how they put tarps and cardboard down so they didn’t step on any of our floors. That was nice. They were very professional and I really had no problems at all with the install. They came, did their job, cleaned up (though, if you ask Bella, she’d tell you she’s pretty irritated by the cigarette butts on our lawn) and they left.
Before they left, my husband wanted to do a walk-through. There was some misunderstanding about that, or they just wanted to leave, because an adequate walk-through was not done. Looking back now, I should not have paid until we got that walk-through we wanted. After they left we found a cracked and chipped marble sill in the living room, spray foam and caulk on the walls, the flashing on the front of our house was broken, and there was a huge blood stain on our primed (not yet painted) bathroom door. There were a couple other things we saw, but the ones I mentioned were our main concerns. I sent an email to our salesperson and he got us in touch with the crew manager who then came out today and fixed everything!
My Thoughts
Despite the few issues, which I think is normal for any type of work you have done on your house, I would definitely recommend Wallside Windows to my friends and family. They were quick to come out and take care of the issues we had and I can’t really ask for anything more. As for the windows…I love them! We were able to lower the temperature in our house by several degrees. It’s so nice to not have to have a ton of layers on and still be cold, in my own house! Being the nerd that I am, I can’t wait until our next heat bill comes to see if it went down! And don’t even get me started on the summer! If these windows keeps us warm in the winter, they will definitely keep us cool in the summer!!
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