We hired Acacia to replace the windows in the front of our house: A three-window bay in the living…read moreroom, and a single window in the dining room.
At first, we'd planned to only replace the living room windows, but even using high-end wood windows, we realized we'd never be able to get a close enough match to the original dining room window. So, we decided to replace it, too.
Three months after we ordered them, the windows arrived. After a brief delay due to one of Acacia's workers being sick, they came out and installed all four windows.
The living room windows were fine, but for some reason the dining room window was built in a colonial style -- it completely didn't match the Craftsman look in the living room (or the window it replaced). Since the two rooms are right next to one another, we're not sure why they didn't realize their mistake. It's pretty depressing to wait months for windows that turned out to be wrong, and then realize that we'll have to wait another 6 weeks, at least, for the new dining room window.
They also tore out the original 80-year-old living room windowsill and apron (the trim piece below the sill), and replaced them with modern sharp-cornered, flat pieces of wood that didn't match the other windows in the house. When we told Acacia that there were pieces missing, they first denied there was any problem. After we gently complained (and, perhaps more importantly, told them we had photos of the window before they removed the woodwork) Acacia came back and trimmed out the LR window in a way that does a better job of matching the existing windows.
Unfortunately, they also screwed up the plaster under the window when they removed the old apron, and left nails all over the place (inside and outside the house). And the crew left a box containing a $500 light fixture that was *inside the living room* out on the front porch (glad nobody stole it!), and didn't put any of the furniture back where they found it. Nice touch, gentlemen.
When we asked them when we could expect their stucco guy to finish the exterior of the house, they said "Oh, we thought you were hiring your own stucco guy" -- even though their original bid mentioned that they would take care of it, at an additional cost to be determined once the window was in place. This was just one of many details that slipped through the cracks throughout the project.
In short, I'm not terribly pleased with Acacia's service. The resulting work is fairly good (if a bit sloppier than I'd like) but we had to prod them at every step of the way, and manage a ton of little details that really shouldn't have been our responsibility. I know that our house painters will be able to fix most of the blobs of caulk and unpatched nail holes, but I would have been happier if they'd shown a little pride in their craftsmanship.
