The only problem being Mat and I don't know how to fit windows. This was, as it happens also preceded by me not knowing how to measure for ordering windows. My older brother Ryan made the windows for us. We knew we wanted wooden windows, we wanted double glazing and we wanted them to look in keeping with the house - obviously. Originally we'd hoped to go for sash windows, this was most likely what would've originally been in the house and would have looked great. Unfortunately, the amount of technical work involved made the cost too high. We were looking at at least £2000 plus per window. Which, while I believe is a good cost for such an item, simply wasn't available in our budget. So after a fair amount of agonising we opted for casement windows. I did some research and found that most houses of that age had slightly larger panes of glass, rather than the later style of lots of much smaller panes of glass. Wanting to keep it simple, I drew up this basic design. On the left are the larger windows with a central divide, on the right, the narrower back windows.
As always with these things, there are compromises to be made. I wanted the windows to have minimum surround, maximum glass, allowing for as much light as possible. Older windows tend to be very elegant and have just this, whereas new plastic double glazing has thick chunky divides between each bit of glass. What I didn't previously realise is that the shear weight of the double glazed glass makes this necessary. The casement has to support the glass and keep its shape without risk of twisting or warping, or simply breaking with the weight of holding the glass up when the window is open.
So the window surrounds had to be thicker, but the compromise to obtain thinner cross pieces as well as making the windows cheaper in terms of materials and build time was to have one large piece of glass with the cross pieces laid on top of it. This helped the support the window, but was not to essential to the structure and so as thick as would have been necessary if there had been 4 separate panes of glass.
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| This is a cross section of the window Ryan sent me, handy to explain what the components of the window are. |
I had to guess a fair amount, which was frustrating to say the least. I'm sure any builder will tell you this is ridiculous, and the guys on Grand Designs are always so scathing of anyone who doesn't manage to measure for there windows accurately, but in all honesty, its not easy. I say this now with a fair amount of experience on the matter. Its also scary, when you're paying up to £1000 per bespoke window, its a big responsibility on your semi-guessing shoulders. I'm owning up to this embarrassment in the hope it might help someone else in the future. The windows turned out to be a little too small, only a few centimetres, I was outraged at myself, there was going to be even less light!! But in reality, or so Mat reassures me, no one but me will notice, and once everythings finished I will barely notice either.
If I did all this again, there are some really simple things I should've tried, but simply, despite a fair amount of research did not know.
First of all, if you can, just remove all of the boxing/architrave/whatever is covering the edges of the windows so that you can't actually see where the frame meets the wall. The edges of the wall are where you need to measure to.
The other thing is that in older houses - or at least Victorian ones, the windows tend to be set back further - often slightly recessed behind the external skin of bricks. Newer houses tend to have the windows in line with the external layer of the house, meaning a deeper window ledge. So quite simply measuring the external window gap and adding a centimetre at each side for it to sit behind the outer brick layer would've made them perfect. It seems a little inaccurate to me as a principle, but would in the case of our house have been totally correct.
So after all that - and a lot of work on Ryan's part that I couldn't begin to explain - our first window arrived:
