Midwest Exteriors MN
2026-09-14T17:56:16.622Z
I hired Midwest Exteriors to do my siding and replace most of my windows. When you hand over $50,000 for a major exterior renovation, you are paying for a professional buying experience, dedicated oversight, and proactive communication, not just the final visual result. My experience was an absolute nightmare, defined by a total lack of oversight, careless execution, premature billing, and a company that was 100% reactive instead of proactive.While every project is different, Homeowners assuming they are getting a dedicated in-house crew should proceed with caution. You may be surprised to find your project outsourced to an unvetted subcontractor who lacks basic trade standards, which was precisely our experience.Execution on site was riddled with mistakes I had to constantly catch. While installing siding blocks, the crew blindly shot nails into both of my electrical panel enclosures, narrowly missing live main cables and bus bars. They suffocated my operating AC by placing heavy plywood directly over the outdoor condenser, overheating it and shutting it down. They also wrapped our home in house wrap over every window without warning, leaving us blacked out inside for 3–4 days. While doing this with wrap is standard, the zero proactive communication was the issue. We had no idea what was happening. Add in crude cuts around vent pipes, unsealed penetrations, missing caulking, and using my personal ratchet strap screwed to a deck floor joist to support a furnace intake line, the lack of quality control was appalling.Instead of managing the job, the project manager was purely reactive. When I reported the nails in my electrical panels, he asked me to pound them back out from inside the panels so his guys could find them. He blamed the sloppy work on an "untrained guy." A dumpster sat in my driveway for over a week with zero work happening after siding was completed, again no communication. He repeatedly missed appointments, sent 10 PM night before cancellation texts, and pushed for me to sign a final certificate of completion before defects were fixed. I insisted on corrections first. To his credit, he sent the crew back to address that initial list, but immediately afterward, he ghosted me for three straight weeks with zero communication from anyone at the company.Despite stating a final walk through was required, I suddenly received a final invoice via email demanding full payment without ever conducting that walk through or signing off. I pushed back immediately, letting the company know I hadn't heard from their project manager in three weeks and had found additional issues needing correction. That was when the owner came out. He offered a half-assed apology for the PM but took the attitude of, "You'll be happy when it's all done," ignoring the chaotic path to get there.I explicitly told the owner face to face that any future workers on my property required advance notice. He agreed. Few days later the workers showed up unannounced on a Sunday afternoon violating both my directive and the no weekend rule set by the salesman. The next morning around 7:30 AM, workers pulled up unannounced again right as I was leaving for work.This company operates under the delusion of, "The house looks good now, so what are you mad about?" What they fail to understand is that as a licensed Master Electrician managing my own high dollar residential projects daily, I know what proper project management looks like. I hold myself to a strict standard, and when I shell out 50k on my home, I expect that same standard in return. A project of this caliber is about the entire experience. The communication, trade competence, and proactive oversight. They didn't manage this project, they simply reacted every time I was forced to manage it for them. The only reason the final product looks acceptable today is because I had to act as the uncompensated quality control manager. My self advocacy saved this job, not their competence or care.