The good: Our salesperson was pleasant to work with and wasn’t pushy.
The not so good: The Mezzo series is a lower quality product. You will see white vinyl exposed on your finished product. It’s not awful. But it’s noticeable.
The frustrating things:
Installation is farmed out. We knew this ahead of time, and I know this is a fairly common practice in the industry. But there are companies that employ their own installers and I do believe the quality and service would be better from installers employed by the company. We were told that Abby worked with just a few installers. We had a group of 6 installers come to our house. I asked one of the guys how long he’d been installing windows, and he said he was a dry-waller by trade and just came along because he knew the lead and didn’t have any other work at the time. Our job required 2 double hung windows and a bay window be connected onsite. It took the crew almost 2 hours and several attempts to figure out how to do this. I asked the lead installer about it and he said he had never had to connect sections onsite before.
The real frustrating part came at the end. I was ready to pay our full bill when installation was complete. When the installer presented the final bill to me, it was $500 less than what I was expecting. I asked him about it, and he said Abby gave us a discount. So, I paid the amount requested. About 2 months later, we received a bill from Abby for $500. I sent an email asking about the charge and explained that their installers said we had received a $500 discount. Abby replied “We allowed you to withhold 5% of the balance until the job was serviced.” The salesperson never mentioned this, and actually said we would pay the remainder of the contract at the time of installation. The installers had no idea about this. And it’s not in the contract. In fact, the contract states that the full bill is due within 5 days of installation. We also know others who have worked with Abby and there was no withholding of 5% at installation to be collected at a later date. In the end, we paid the $500, was mostly likely an account error on their part that they figured out 2 months later.
Service. We’ve had an ongoing issue with neither every window that Abby installed where white vinyl is showing due to a piece that is not attached correctly, and probably got that why during installation. We shared it with Abby and a tech came out to our house, looked at it, and told my wife if we’re bothered by, we can just “pop” the piece back into place. He didn’t show her how or offer to do it on any of the windows. I tried but was not able to do it. I’ve asked Abby about it several times, asking for a tech to come back out or for instructions on how to reattach the piece correctly, and several times she replied along the lines of “You should just be able to click it back in or slide it up.” Unhelpful. Unfortunately, it feels like ‘we got your money, we’re done with you.’
