So two weeks ago, after receiving the last of our three quotes for double glazing – just like all the experts recommend – we booked a company to come and fit our new windows. While this company is only marginally cheaper than the other two, they said we could visit their window supplier to see the quality of the windows on offer and talk through our options in terms of handles, Georgian bars etc. This seemed like a good idea, so I popped in there one lunch time with IB. Now, if you’re ever getting double glazed windows, I strongly recommend you meet directly with the manufacturer, you learn so much more than if you just talk to the middle man. The supplier was passionate about windows and spent nearly an hour answering our questions and talking us through the product. Best of all for us was that we learned that we could have lead-lined Georgian bars and it wouldn’t cost any extra which was excellent news as we’d thought our budget would only stretch to grey or white bars, neither of which look very classy. In both cases it’s like a kid has taken a pot of grey/white paint and a ruler and drawn a load of squares on the glass. Also the guy was really open and told us not to bother paying to have the bars ‘distressed’ because the weather would do the job for us. So, we ordered 18 windows and a set of French doors on the spot and the builders started work putting them in today!
I am SO excited at the thought of how warm I’m going to be when they’re done. In the meantime though, it’s going to take seven working days to get all the windows fitted. That’s SEVEN days of having gaping holes of varying sizes in the house in temperatures hovering around 1 degree. I have now abandoned all hope of ever dressing fashionably/presentably again. My daily uniform – in the house(!) – is five layers made up of t-shirts, vests, jumpers and a fleece, plus fingerless gloves and a four foot long woolly scarf that goes round my neck three times. I do have to remember to unwrap a length whenever I go to the front door lest the person knocking thinks I’m recovering from some kind of plastic surgery.
We had of course hoped after our disaster with the cavity wall insulation that the windows might go in without a glitch but we came home this evening to find the Georgian bars on the INSIDE of the windows. Our initial thought was that the glass MUST have been put in the wrong way around, after all, how would the bars ever become ‘distressed’ if they were on the inside of the house. But then, you know how if you look at something for long enough, it starts to look right? Well that’s what happened to us and by the end of the evening although we favoured the bars being on the outside of the window, we decided in a fit of post modernism that we could live with our Georgian bars on the inside. Anyway, it wasn’t to be, the builders just called to say that the suppliers had put the ‘fit this side out’ stickers on the wrong side of the panes, so our windows will be ‘flipped’ in the morning and the bars keeping us locked into this renovation project will remain firmly on the outside!
Old Windows
Shiny New Windows!
DIY Decorating Dame 