urban JOINERY

Absolutely terrible. We ordered hardwood windows and front door for our renovation from urbanJoinery. urbanJoinery resells windows made in Poland and our experience is that they do an extremely bad job of being a middleman between the manufacturers and the installers urbanJoinery provides. We experienced incompetence from the beginning until the end when they (Irfan) stopped returning emails and phone calls, having failed to resolve our many, many problems, and stated that they were getting out of the window business. Virtually every single window had significant problems. To start, we are told by experts that our windows have been made with incorrect profiles (stormproof casements had the stormproof components removed to make them **look** like flush casements, but they don't have a correct flush casement profile and are incorrectly sized, so they don't seal and are not weathertight). The sills have incorrect angles and no profile to prevent water pooling, so do not shed water, and they are rotten already in some places. Significant numbers of windows were the wrong size and were either too big or too small for the openings, even though urbanJoinery measured final size openings on site. Casements and fan lights opened that shouldn't. Casements and fan lights that should have opened didn't. Casements were too small for their frames and didn't seal - you could feel air flow come through and see daylight around casements from day one. Casement joints started to come apart within weeks of installation. The front door arrived and was 100mm too narrow! It goes on. A year and a half on after moving in, we have frames that are rotting, frames that are coming apart (you can see daylight where the joints have come apart), hardware that has rusted due to pooling water and improper spec of materials, and windows that leak in places when it rains (from day one). From incompetence in survey / measurement accuracy, to inadequate / inappropriate manufacturing design and specification, to poor manufacturing quality, and completely misleading information on the web site (check FENSA registration first and talk to the insurance backed guarantee company - we found when it was too late that neither was in good standing and that there was no recourse whatsoever). We are now facing the huge cost and disruption of replacing our windows and making good internally and externally which is a much larger and more costly project than installing windows at an appropriate phase during an original programme of works. Below are just a few example photos of problems we encountered, many of which were evident from the day of installation, and others which emerged in just a few months.

Several of the sash windows and a french door our contractor (Aaron Lewis from Trust & Able) ordered from Urban Joinery (who came to do the measurements themselves) did not fit once they were delivered. They had to be sent back and we had to wait for an other 9 weeks before they delivered the new ones. Some of these were still wrong: They forgot to put a lock on one of the windows, did not put privacy screens on 2 others but said they would be back to fix that and a few other problems. We waited again and tried to contact Irfan but he never answered his phone or replied to our texts, so we went to the address on the website on march 15 and discovered that "Unit 31" was actually a mail box at MailBoxes etc. in Ealing. 15 minutes after our visit, we got a text from Irfan saying that we were a top priority. We have not heard from him since.