It’s only a window and a door….
How complicated can it be to fit a window and a door?
One of our clients decided they’d like a really different kind of a door recently!
You may well laugh! If it had been a standard door we’d have had no problems with it and the window could have been fitted at any time. In this case, as in quite a few of our projects for homeowners and builders, someone decided to have a different door – a very different door!
On this particular door the glass sliding door frame is made of accoya wood and the glazing is triple glazed to improve the energy efficiency, nothing too special. What makes this tricky is that this door slides into the wall!
And to make this job a tad more difficult it’s not just any old wall either! It’s the wall that supports the whole back of the house making it imperative that there are metal beams and support columns hidden in the wall to hold the house up.
Here we tackle not only a wall with a sliding pocket door and structural elements but a bit of a strange window too!
This window is a frameless projecting glass box that wraps over the top of the wall and runs back over the roof. It doesn’t look its best at the moment as we’re busy finishing off the whole construction site but the daylight streaming into the room looks absolutely fantastic! It changes the whole feel of the room.
The window projects out from the wall itself so we don’t want a gutter running past it. What we’ve had to do is use an integral gutter to take the rainwater away from the zinc roof to the downpipes.
Oh yeah! The downpipes! I almost forgot that part. Let me explain.
The outside of this wall is different to all the other walls on the house. (I kid you not!)
This wall has external insulation and timber rainscreen cladding with the rainpipes running inside the wall.
So, to recap, we have a wall with integral zinc gutters and rainpipes, steel structural elements, external wall insulation, timber cladding, a projecting window and a glass pocket sliding door.
This section of wall has required a bricklayer to build the blockwork, a structural engineer to design the structural elements and a steelworker to fit them, a structural glazing firm to fit the window, a different door firm to fit the pocket slider, the zinc roofer, the external insulation guy and a carpenter to make a great job of the cladding.
I wouldn’t mind but the wall is only 3 meters long!
Simple really, after all it’s only a window and a door………
Sorry, I forgot to mention we also needed to fit the external air vent for the multifuel stove into the wall, but that story is for another day…
This is what we do. We’d love to hear what you would have recommended for this project!
