CW from Calgary

Horrendous Installation, Terrible Follow-Up Service until Complained to Owner Important words of wisdom; if you choose to work with Max Green, make sure to check the interior of each window before they put the casing on to see if they fully insulated the window! This will be a little long, but there were so many mistakes made, it is necessary. Looking at all the positive reviews, it looks like we were the unlucky ones to have a nightmare of a job with Max Green; I could not be more disappointed, frustrated, or angry at the installation job. This was the second time using these guys after they did a great job replacing a leaking window for us, so we thought we had nothing to worry about. Alan was our installation lead. It was like pulling teeth to get them out to our house every step of the way. After the installation we noticed a lot of deficiencies in the exterior work: they missed caulking large portions of the windows on the exterior of the house, one basement window only had the top half caulked, they forgot to caulk the top of a window, multiple windows had gaps in the dapping on the interior, they didn’t properly fill the ½” gap of stucco they overcut below one window. They had to build a box for our basement bedroom windows as it is a deep window well and the wood they put in was poorly cut and had a ¼” gap between the casing and the wood that looked terrible. It took three weeks for them to come out and do the touch-ups and after they left, the basement window that was half-caulked still had large gaps in the caulking, the ¼” over-cut stucco gap was still not properly filled, and they had to come back to put a new piece of wood to replace the poorly cut one in the deep window well. Three weeks later (six weeks after installation) they had still not come so I decided to email management to get someone else out to finish Alan’s job; they apologized for the lack of service and sent Jim the installation manager out that night to look at the problems, but this is when the fun began. We were concerned that if their exterior work was so sloppy that the interior work was also lacking, and we were certainly correct on that. We asked the manager to take the casing off some of the windows to look at the installation job, and here’s what we found: 1) One of the deep window well boxes they constructed out of normal MDF instead of the medex wood we paid for. Normal MDF rots when exposed to moisture, medex does not. Combine that with the two foot gap they inexplicably left in the insulation above the window (which would create a cold spot and preferentially condense water), and we have a rotten window sill. 2) It turns out that the poorly cut piece of wood that was on the other deep window well was actually concealing a spot where they put their grinder through the fascia of the window. They used that extra piece of wood to conceal physical damage done to our window so we wouldn’t know. 3) The ten foot long basement window had zero insulation along the bottom of the window. 4) Almost every other window had insufficient insulation and had to be topped up. Had they come and finished their touch-ups properly and a done them a couple days after the install, we never would have known about all the major deficiencies; how sloppy of an install they did, how many mistakes they made on the install. We would have been sitting around wondering why our basement was still so cold after spending so much money on new windows. It is important to note that Jim the installation manager was great in addressing these problems, he offered to replace the damaged basement window free of charge, and he sent out Wes to address Alan’s crews many mistakes and deficiencies within a couple days of our complaint. Wes did a good job addressing all the mistakes made by Alan's crew. I read the other reviews on this website, and one in particular that received a 100 dollar rebate for having a little dapping on the window they had to scrape off, and here we are SEVEN weeks after the installation with our walls with damaged drywall (which we now have to repaint at our own cost) from having to pull the casing off all the windows, three and a half additional days of repairs on a four day installation job, and all we have received in compensation is a “sincere apology.” I really hope that this is a one-off disaster of an install, and not a symptom of what this company is becoming. Our first install we were treated with respect and everything was done well in a timely fashion; and they fired that guy. This one we were forgotten, deceived, and pushed aside until we complained to the owner.