Kidlington Whole House Glazing Upgrade

The two sets of 90 degree bay windows are clearly the centrepiece; dominating the roadside elevation of the home. For us, 90 degree bays are usually nothing too complicated, but these were quite interesting to work on…

Clearly designed and built around 70mm deep plastic windows, the 90 degree corners sensibly hid structural steel posts. The fun part starts when realising, no matter how tightly we squeeze them in, the 127mm deep frames we’ll be putting in will create a massive space around the steel that previously wasn’t there. By building up the steel posts with treated timber, adding insulating foam, and custom-fabricating new aluminium corner covers, our installers have worked their magic. The result looks as though it was always designed that way.

The downside? Well, we had to warn the customer ahead of the install that the customer corner covers would take some time to make after the windows had been installed. Not a problem generally because everything would still be weather-tight without those covers. But we wanted to make sure the customer was aware the bay corners wouldn’t look great in this in-between period, and we would be back with the final metalwork to do the finishing touches.

There are plenty of close-up images near the hinges in this gallery. And, yes, the hinges are interesting – a bit larger than we’d see on a UK-made window; better suited to carrying the weight of modern glazing. If your chosen frame really doesn’t work with the standard grey, you can receive painted hinges to match. But our focus here is actually a perfect tolerance gap and a perfect (though we say so ourselves) application of the black expanding weather tape.

We sadly don’t undertake many projects the opening we’re provided with are perfectly straight an level …check out any number of our Cotswold stone galleries… But this home was almost from an indoor window fitters training day! Anyone in the industry will have witnessed the perfect conditions that most installation trainers base their demonstrations on, and we suspect this was the closest we’ll ever get to that take on reality. You can see the 11mm tolerance gap all the way down between every frame and every run of brickwork. This is the ideal scenario and a flawless example of how that black weather seal should be used as a final finish.

The combination of entrance doors and window doors showcase the different usability cases within the same home; a door-sized hole doesn’t necessarily require door levels of practicality. Entrance doors have relatively thick frames, which create enough space to house high security locks and handles inside and out – exactly as you’d hope for in a door! Window-doors are designed to only have locks and handles on the inside. So, although the size of a door, you would use them identically to a window.