What do you say when someone calls and asks if you can do a 3,000 square foot job in less than 24 hours? For Tom Wallace, project manager at New England Window Film, the answer was an easy “yes.”

A contractor called Wallace in late April, asking if his company, New England Window Film, could install dichroic film on the top floor of the Prudential Tower in Boston. There was one catch, though.

“He explained that the job was in an event space being renovated, and that the film had to be the last touch,” Wallace says. “We would have one day, about six weeks after the phone call, to install the film before the space opened the next morning.”

Wallace accepted. He then called two other veteran installers he knew could handle the job.

Tom Wallace, Randy Humphries, Kevin Arnett and Ray Amaral recently installed dichroic film in the top floor of the Prudential Tower in Boston. Image used with permission from New England Window Film.

“Randy Humphries of Tint Works in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and Kevin Arnett of Southern Sun Shield in Conroe, Texas, flew in from out-of-state to do this job with me,” he says. “They got here the night before and left right after we were done. We also couldn’t have done the job without our prep guy at New England Window Film, Ray Amaral either.”

All four showed up at 6 a.m. on June 2 and got to work. They had until midnight to finish.

Wallace had already scoped out the floor, so he arrived with a plan in mind. The crew hit a bit of a snag at the very beginning, though.

“We showed up, and there were still other vendors there doing finishing touches,” he says. “We had to work around them, so my original game plan wouldn’t work anymore. We restructured it on the spot.”

The project covered around 3,000 square feet of glass. Image used with permission from New England Window Film.

Wallace says they ended up “leap-frogging” around the floor so they could work without anyone in their way and without disturbing the other vendors.

New England Window Film specializes in decorative film, so the dichroic installation wasn’t out of his wheelhouse. Still, the film required a bit of extra thought.

“The color of the film shifts depending on the angle you’re looking at it,” Wallace says. “We had to install each piece at the same angle  [so the color flowed smoothly]. That meant a bit more film waste than usual as we cut the film to fit the glass’s width. Luckily, the renovation budget was big enough to cover it.”

The top floor of Prudential Tower is an event space which was just renovated. Adding decorative film was the last step of the renovation, Wallace says. Image used with permission from New England Window Film.

The crew had 18 hours to complete the job, and Wallace says they did it in 14.

“I would 100% do something like that again,” he says. “In fact, I already have another job with that contractor on the books.”