My Experience

After buying a tiny dark house, with the windows painted shut decades before…I was motivated to draw in as many windows as possible… as seen in the 50 windows below…

HOW TO BUY WINODWS…

My contractor put me in touch with her window salesman.

I took my 3D drawings to his office, and one by one, started the inventory. 

The 3D drawings made it so much easier than blueprints…we could both see everything clearly. 

Besides picking the sizes, he had to declare which ones needed to be tempered or not tempered.  (near doors, near stairs etc).

I had many tall windows with transoms in the rooms with 10-foot ceilings… Anderson windows had these as one package… making it one window, with one measurement instead of two.

He was also responsible for buying doors… another thing I was unprepared for. 

I had to learn Right side opening from Left side…then pick the door surface pattern and know firmly the size of the doors… 32” 34” 36” wide.

The catch with all this, is if I made any mistakes, there was no returning custom sized/tempered windows and doors.   So, I double checked this over and over again. 

Each mistake was about $800, so I was perfect…yes, yes I was!

Since I was so familiar with the order, it made it easier to coordinate window sizes with the framer.  

The framer just wanted the facts, unambiguous, cold facts….so I made clear labels on the blueprints…showing inventory line number, Rough Opening (RO).