The Workman Waltz

Ugh. How I hate dealing with contractors and workmen and vendors. Over the past week, I’ve checked around with various Milgard vendors and discovered the following:

 1) Home Depot has a deal with Milgard—HD staff thinks their beloved employer is Milgard’s exclusive big-box vendor in Arizona. They’re wrong.

2) Costco is selling the same model of Milgard (Tuscany 8621T) and underpricing Home Depot.

3) Home Depot Direct, a branch of HD that tries to upsell customers by coming to the home and delivering a pitch, is peddling windows by Simonton that have various blandishments built-in, some of which appear to improve on the Milgard product. In 2009, Simonton Windows were rated #1 in a JD Powers study, but builders themselves seem ambivalent—some commenters on an National Association of Home Builders site seem to think they’re just OK; others say they have the best warranty and customer service. Milgard has racked up a ton of consumer complaints around the Web, but at the NAHB site, contractors in general like Milgard but warn that the company does not warranty glass breakage and the rollers are not very good. Home Depot is almost universally reviled, and some commenters urge purchasing Simonton from other, local dealers.

 On the doors alone, Home Depot is underbidding the excellent and beloved Freelite (for example: for the net 71.5″ x 79.5″ slider, Freelite’s price is $1132 and HD’s is $983), and Costco is underbidding Home Depot ($966 for the same door). Home Depot charges $399 for installation, but if you’re buying more than one unit, they drop the cost to $218 for the subsequent installations (made in one purchase, that is)—so they’re trouncing Freelite, with its $450 installation/unit figure.

However, often one gets what one pays for.

Costco’s installer came across as a raving flake, and so I’m afraid I didn’t get so far as to ask about installation cost—I was too busy running in the other direction.

HD’s in-store salesman gave me bids (not including installation, which I had to find out about and calculate on my own, with who knows how much accuracy) for the sliding doors, but told me that to get the windows I’d have to have a guy come to my home and give me a pitch. This turned out to be a visit from Home Depot Direct, whose rep occupied over an hour of my time trying to sell me the Simonton doors. The (approximate) results:

It appears that Simonton windows are similar in quality to Milgard’s, but Simonton has a uniquely amazing warranty. On the other hand, I’ve had no complaints about the Milgard windows that Freelite installed in the house back in the day when I had an actual income. Au contraire: in response to what seemed to me to be a minor issue, Freelite’s guys descended on the offending window, removed it from the frame, and reinstalled it to meet their exacting standards. No problem of any sort has ever ensued. They did an excellent job not only on installing the windows, but also in installing four skylights. Real skylights, not those tube things.

So as you can imagine, I’m inclined to go with Freelite. Only problem is…I can’t afford Freelite.

The Simonton windows may be slightly better than the Milgard that Freelite sells. However, there is NO chance I’m buying them from Home Depot. Why?

a) I do not like being upsold, nor do I appreciate being put in a position where some guy comes to my house and hustles me to buy something that is different from what I specifically said I want to buy; and

b) Home Depot contracts out installation. You have no choice about who shows up at your house to put this stuff in. It is, in a word, a pig in a poke. In my experience, HD’s service is mixed—sometimes just fine, sometimes not altogether fine. So if I can find a company that sells the same product but is an actual vendor and installer unto itself, well, then…if they’ve been in business more than ten days and twenty minutes, I incline to give them a chance.

I really want the wide (“French”) rails at least on the two doors in the family/dining room. To cut corners, I could get away with the standard tract-house “narrow” rails for the door in the bedroom.

This afternoon it was over to Angie’s List, where I found one outfit not far from my house—they’re to send an estimate whenever they get around it, based on Freelite’s measurements. Then it was on to the enthusiastically reviewed Wholesale Window and Doors, not far from here at-tall. Get them on the phone: “Can I call you back. We’re in the process of moving our office and…” If you’ve ever moved an office, you know what this poor soul is going through. She: to call me back tomorrow. Angie’s list customers adore, worship, and sanctify Wholesale Window and Doors. Wholesale carries Milgard. So…let’s see what, if anything, they can do.

The Workman Waltz goes on…