championwindow.com

The Worst Contractor Experience of Our Lives

In March of 2019 we contracted with Champion to install a 15 x 10 foot sunroom on our Western Washington house for $52,000. The first time it started to rain the floor was covered in water. The workers who built the structure came out to deal with the issue multiple times but nothing they did stopped the flooding. A few weeks in, the person running the job told us that he had been drilling the wrong type of holes in the base, that he had just been informed that perfectly round holes won't drain properly, that they needed to be oval in shape. He ovalized the holes, problem solved. That problem, anyway, and only after weeks of ineffectual bumbling.Next--and ongoing, as of this writing--problem: the roof started leaking almost at the same time as the floor started flooding, every time it rained more than a sprinkle. Same crew that didn't know they were supposed to drill holes in the base came out to address the new problem. Went on the roof and tightened things up in some way. Leak continued, they came back and tightened things up again. Eventually it stopped leaking at the roof/roof junction and began leaking further down the roof line. I’m assuming that what they did was to plug up all of the most upstream leaks that allowed water to breach the sunroof's interior at that particular spot, and now the water was traveling down the interior of the sloped roof and finding its way out anywhere it could. Causing God knows what kind of damage to our new and existing structures along the way. I reached out to Champion about once or twice a year to report the leak, and they came out once or twice a year to try to resolve it. Their general strategy was to apply one or another type of fix (caulk this, add more screws to that, re-tarpaper the roof etc.) then tell us to call back if that didn’t fix the problem. It never did.The last time they came out, the person they sent ran water down our roof from just above the line of the roof/roof junction, onto and down the sunroom roof for about an hour, saw no leaks inside the sunroom, and claimed to have "proven" that the problem had to be occurring above the line where Champion's work was done, and was therefore not their responsibility. The obvious problem with Champion's "proof" is this: having come out to inspect the building during a period of sustained clear days and high temperatures--with sunlight beating down on the roofline of both the house and the sunroom, causing everything to expand and shift in the heat--the inherent makeup of both roofs and the intersection between them was totally different than in in a period of sustained lower temperatures and precipitation. There is absolutely no justification for coming out in a period of hot, dry weather and claiming to have proven that no leaks can possibly be occurring in cold, damp weather.In December 2022 I managed to get hold of Roy Richter, Regional Manager for Champion in the West. He agreed to come out and take another look at the work that had been done. Roy and I arranged a time for him to come over. The day before the appointment he called up to say that he would not be available until after the 13th because he was going on vacation. I said no problem, let's meet up after the 13th. Since then I have emailed Roy directly twice and called his mobile number twice, with no response of any kind. I take this to mean, "**** this guy, I'm sick of hearing him complain about his roof." Well Roy, if you're sick of hearing about our leaky roof, imagine how we must feel, living as we do underneath it.In January 2023 I gave up trying to get Roy to respond and instead reached out through Champion’s customer service Web portal. I was contacted shortly thereafter by Rodney Lacheney, the Install Manager. Instead of denying the obvious or actively refusing to communicate with us, Rodney agreed (he might even have broached the subject himself, I don’t recall) to send out a roofing contractor with which they work. The roofing contractor took a five-minute walk around the roof and announced that he had found the problem: the people who had installed the sunroom had laid the new section of the roof over the existing roof rather than tucking it under. There was never any chance in any plane of existence that the roof was *not* going to leak, and no less (and possibly more) than four different people from Champion had walked around on this same roof and failed to notice this. The roofer came back and fixed Champion’s glaring, stupid, infinitely avoidable error, and our sunroom did not leak through a typically rain-soaked Puget Sound Winter and Spring, nor has it since.To give them due credit, Champion paid for the repairs.In summary, we would recommend, in the strongest possible terms, that you stay away from Champion.

Date of experience: Feb 01, 2023