Fenestration
When the Husband and I began designing our remodeled house, we knew we wanted two things: high ceilings and giant windows.
Our first address as a twosome was 223 Congress Street, Apt. 3L, Brooklyn, NY 11201. That’s the RSVP address on our wedding invitations. If I could buy that apartment I would, because to this day I have never loved another space the way I loved that one bedroom apartment. It was walking distance to everything: the subway, a fish market, a butcher shop, a grocer, our favorite restaurants, dear friends. It also had high ceilings and giant windows. Our first Christmas tree was so tall that we had to keep going back to Walgreens for more lights.
The nice thing about high ceilings is that they are reasonably straight forward to achieve and are not a budget-busting upgrade. Windows, on the other hand, are a hellscape of cascading decisions. Big, as it turns out, is not enough information to go on. First, you need to decide what kind of windows you would like. Neither the Husband nor I had ever lived in a house that had anything other than single or double hung windows (the kind that open from the bottom and/or the top). Our one experience of buying windows involved swapping out single hung windows that didn’t work with single hung ones that did. So when our architect asked what kind of windows we wanted, we went with what we knew.
The next decision involved choosing what type of material we wanted for the windows. Vinyl, said the Husband, recalling the sticky sills of our East Coast upbringing. Steel, I said, because I did not yet know how jaw-droppingly expensive those pretty puppies are. Aluminum or fiberglass-clad on the outside and wood on the inside said pretty much everyone else who proffered an opinion.
There are many window brands, and within these brands are many different lines. It quickly became apparent that the big boys in the front were going to dictate what brand/line we ended up choosing, since not every line can produce a 6’6” window topped by another 2’ window. So we went to a bunch of window showrooms and the Husband opened and closed a lot of windows and eventually we made our selection.
Then the doubt crept in.
“Are you sure you want to go with double-hung windows?” a coworker (whose opinion I value) asked. She had remodeled her home a few years back, and had thoughtfully considered every detail.
“Double-hung windows? On a modern house?” queried one of the contractors from whom we requested a bid.
“Um, yes?” I said. “Yes, absolutely,” said the Husband. He was quite confident that he wanted to open windows from the bottom up and not with some weird circular action that looked hard on the wrist joints. He mimed all of this anytime the issue was raised.
The opening mechanisms of windows are one of those things you don’t really notice until you need to, and then it’s all you can see. And on my jogs around the neighborhood, I saw that all of the more modern homes did indeed have casement windows. Thus began my campaign to convince the Husband that casement windows were the way to go, and that he could get used to [here I mimed the circular wrist action.] This involved even more visits to showrooms, where I fell in love with a brand/line that mimicked the look of my beloved steel: Kolbe VistaLuxe.
Sadly, the contractors we spoke with were not pleased with Kolbe; apparently its lingering supply chain issues have stalled many a project over the last year. Definitely not what we wanted. Finally, we found a brand/line we could all live with, which turned out to be the same brand/line that we had selected when we were looking at double windows: Andersen E-Series.
This was not, however, where the decision making ended. We knew we wanted black exteriors, but we weren’t 100% sure about the interior color. Andersen E-Series windows can come primed on the inside, which is great for the indecisive among us, but the hardware color and screen color needed to be selected at the time of order. In an attempt to delay this decision further, I asked about going with a neutral hardware color, something in an unobtrusive metal. This added a whopping $4,300 to the total cost and was promptly dismissed as an option.
Unfortunately, our initial order failed to clear Title 24 requirements. Our window vendor changed our glass option from “SmartSun” to “Heatlock Technology” and voilà, requirements met! It also jacked up the bottom line by $4k. Moral of the story: make sure your initial window quotes are Title 24 compliant.
