Renewal by Andersen of NJ/NY Metro — Local services in Cranford

The windows are great, and the installers were polite, efficient and easy to work with. Unfortunately, they were also sloppy and didn't do enough to clean up the outside. After they left, I noticed a lot more debris outside my home and on my driveway. I kicked myself for not paying more attention to this before they left as I picked up a bunch of nails / screws, sheet metal, pulleys, pieces of window flashing and other debris that came off the old windows. It would be just ugly and annoying if we didn’t end up with five punctured tires!

An operations manager from Renewal by Andersen tried to make good by offering to pay for the repair of one of the tires (the other four were on a company vehicle that covered tire replacement) and agreeing to come back to do a sweep with a rolling magnet at my request. Surprisingly, he said they don’t use the magnet regularly after every job the way roofing companies typically do. The operations manager who came by with the magnet didn’t find much since I’d already gotten most of what was left behind. He became clearly skeptical about my complaint after that his responses to my texts reflected that. The attitude ticked me off enough that I did another sweep myself and came up with a surprising amount of debris. The pic attached is about a month post-install after I’d picked up the most obvious stuff I saw, a few runs of our lawn service and after the operations manager did his sweep. It includes several more screws and nails (3 came from the driveway), sheet metal offcuts (from the new trim they installed), a sash-weight pulley, larger wood fragments (one long one with a nail in it!), some window gasket strips and a bunch of larger pieces of glazing and paint chips.

These are great windows but understand that one of the reasons you pay so much for them is because Renewal by Andersen is a one-stop shop that stands behind both their product and workmanship. They use experienced, trained Andersen installers who know what they’re doing so you can be confident that any problems with the windows or the installation will be taken care of. Not cleaning up after the job seems like an obvious but fixable miss. Dealing with skepticism and one-word, half-hearted responses from the company after that is just insult on top of injury that makes me question our decision to go with Andersen.

If you do go with them, INSIST they do a thorough cleanup outside your home. Much of the debris is ferrous and will get picked up with a magnet but most of it is not (see pic attached). Insist they use a pickup magnet AND that the whole crew does a few sweeps before they get in...

In the end it worked put OK. 1st I left a great 5 star review on their site and Google but the salesman was wrong to say I'd get a tax credit of half of the $6800 that my door cost. The salesman said I'll be here... you can call me anytime even a year from now but then 2 weeks after the door was installed I got a letter stating that Scott no longer works there. He retired. He told me if I bought the real expensive door I'd get a tax credit of half the amount. I went through breast cancer recently so I don't make enough to qualify for a tax credit. Was on disability and TOLD the salesman that when he was in my living room. You have to make money and pay a lot in taxes to get a tax credit. He said, "No, you will get half the money back." Therefore, I bought the expensive door. My accountant said I won't get any money back for the door. I asked my accountant yesterday because we set up an appointment to do my taxes like we do every February and he said that's not true because you don't get a tax credit unless you pay a lot of taxes and when you're either retired or on disability you pay very little in taxes on your mutual funds (unless u r rich) but that's not enough money to get you a tax credit. So I called the company yesterday which was January 20, 2025 and they said someone will get back to me but instead they sent me a very long letter with 3 attachments on tax credits. Today they made me much happier because the president of the company called me. He said I'm sorry that my salesman stated you information that was not correct but I will send you a check for $1500 for the fact that my salesman didn't tell you the right information. It's not half the door which is what the salesman said I would get back but it definitely helps and I thought it was very nice that the president of the company will be sending me a $1500;check in the next ten days. They made good on giving me some money back. The door for $6800 looks great. However, I've been aggravated over this and it's hard to give 5 stars when I was misinformed originally. I will not get $3000 back but they assured me they will send me $1500 so they are making good on giving some type of credit by giving me some of the money back. I thought it was very nice that the president of the company called me and that makes them responsible. The door does look great and very weatherproof which I can tell as it's 11° with a wind chill of -1 right now in NJ and there isn't any draft at all in the door area. In the end they did the...

Will revise my review in the future but in the meantime I reserve the right to let everyone know that if you need to count on management at this company to do the right thing, you're likely wrong.

I know very little about windows, but one thing I know is that there's a reason why they send someone to come out to measure and it's because windows tend not to be the same size but for some reason what was brought to my house were ten windows of the exact same size, NONE of which were actually a fit for any of them. That means at every single step of the way, from the person who inputted the measurements, to the manufacturer, to their QA, to the person who received the windows at the Cranford location and then to the person who loaded the windows on the van, none of them cared enough to check. To make matters worse, when I called the Cranford office and asked them what was going on, I got a woman who insisted a project manager must come to my house to confirm the windows were the wrong size and then to discuss "options". Other than either canceling my order (which is really what I'd like at this point in time) the windows need to be manufactured properly. I'm guessing this person was having a bad day because she doesn't meet my expectation in terms of what a customer service manager should provide. Even if personally she really doesn't care that all my windows were wrong and the crew wasted half a day, she could at least have pretended. It would have been a shock to me had she actually called me back to follow up, so no surprise she didn't. I don't know who the executives at this location are but it looks like they don't care either and I now believe I didn't even get what I ordered, but instead got a bunch of samples and they were just hoping I'd accept an "offer" to cut the sheetrock in an effort to force them to fit. If this was really a complete mess up on their end, they would have contacted me immediately but they haven't and it's a shame that I may never be able to trust them to do the right thing. If only I could cancel and get my money back I'd go elsewhere as this is pretty much proof that they'll never respond when you have a...