Looking after clients.

My Service Manager Carlos, together with one of our superintendents, Dan, and myself, spent considerable time on the roof of a five year old home a week or two back.  The client had called me at home one evening to say that water was seeping through the kitchen ceiling.  The official warranty on this sort of thing in our industry lasts for 12 months; that is, "if the home doesn't leak in the first year, the builder is off the hook".

I have never been comfortable with this.  So I broke the official policy and went to see the client anyway.  This is a beautiful home that we built and our customer needed help.

Our rooftop visit was very useful as we quickly found a flashing detail that had been installed wrongly by our people, 5 years ago.  It held up for a few seasons, but as some of the window trim shrunk down to size, it started letting water in.

The next day, Carlos and Dan fixed the problem.

In the process, we decided to augment our building specification, at no cost to customers, by adding an elastomeric seal called Envelope Seal to our typical window installations.  This is a great product that seals the window flange to the surrounding framing.  Apparently the manufacturer has done many thousands of windows without leaks of any kind.  I am hopeful that window leaks will become a thing of the past in our new homes as a result of this change.