does anyone ever pick wooden windows over upvc?

[stickeywicket]

I know you have to if you're in a conservation area but we're not in a conservation area more 1930s semis and everyone has upvc. Would I be mad to consider putting in wood frame windows and wooden porch? It looks so much nicer.

Smartypants don't most come with a guarantee? I'm sure ours came with a 10 or 20 year guarantee.

Also, we really struggled to find someone willing to paint our old wooden ones. It just didn't seem like a job that most decorators were prepared to do and we are quoted almost as much as new PVC ones.

Plastic windows are fucking minging and I think you should be incentivised encouraged to have wooden window frames.

I'm a building surveyor. I see yellowed ones quite a lot and failed units too.

Ours are 11 years old (only owned house for 2.5 years), they are still white and function perfectly.

Smartypants- Yes but don't you also see lots of inferior quality wooden windows that need replacing.

My house is 140 years old and has all its original wooden windows. I wonder if plastic ones will last 140 years?

I think the plastic window industry has really upped its game over the last decade and over the last 5 years especially.

"When the Planning Inspectorate Representative overturned a council objection to PVCu saying "the (Bygone) window appears to replicate a traditional sliding sash window very closely. The effect is so convincing that it is difficult to differentiate between the two, even at close quarters" we know we are providing the best."

The above quote is from

www.kitson.co.uk/sash.html

Wooden windows are great if they are maintained, modern wood is even better.

Upvc has it's place, but it's definitely not perfect and I dislike it, especially on older properties.

If I lived in a modernish house, I might feel differently but in period or bespoke houses upvc is just wrong, imo.

Woollyideas -you must really look after them.

Woolly - same at my parents' house. And I'm not aware of them ever having been painted in the 20 odd years they've lived there... [ponders neglectful window ownership]

smartypants - What sort of house do you live in? And what sort of windows. Perhaps you need to try it?

And those of you saying you can't have uPVC in a conservation area, that's nonsense.

PastGrace They must live in an unusual microclimate if they don't have to paint their windows for 20 years.

I have a timber orangery which is S facing. And we paint it every second year.

uPvc windows are awful and on old buildings - and I include 1930s semis in that - they look atrocious. Listed or unlisted, conservation area or not, they should be banned IMO as a public nuisance.

I can't believe I'm arguing the case FOR plastic windows. fgs. My 30 year old self despises me, I feel it.

MrsJAlfredPudfrock - uPvc in a conservation area IME depends on vigilant the planners/conservation officers are. And whether people bother getting permission. Also i there is a precedent from before the time the area was designated, or because people have flouted the rules, it becomes more difficult to refuse.

MrsJAPfrock the North West... I'm sure they'd look nicer if they were painted, but you don't look at the house and think "oooh, they should have painted them years ago". They had it reroofed recently so scaffolding was up, and still no window painting.

[baffled]

Upvc windows are horrid. Our neighbour has some new ones which are slightly less horrid than the older ones but only marginally. I might possibly buy a new house that had them but would never buy a period property where they had been installed.

The problem with upvc is that the frames are too chunky and the lines are all wrong because you can see which windows open. This can be remedied by getting ull sashes and some window companies offer slim frames. The best solution though is a wooden frame with a Aluminium veneer - fantastic insulating qualities, no maintainence/painting needed and you could go for internal painted/varnished wood with external wood/aluminium veneer if you like that kind of thing.

I have uPVC and I can barely see out because the frames are so huge.

gaelicsheep In conservation areas planning permission is not normally required for the replacement of windows if the property is a single house (i.e. not flats, or one of a terrace, or commercial prop). An Article 4 direction would change this within a conservation area.

I'm well aware of that, but in my authority the planners often determine applications for conservation area consent.

FFSEnid - Ah shame. There are some terrible uPVC windows but I think it's a mistake to blame the material.

Perhaps if people stopped being so sniffy about plastic windows, we'd get something really wonderful.

I'd like a matt (not shiny) old white coloured uPVC window with separate glazing panels made from old fashioned (cylinder) glass - so you'd still get that separate blown-pane effect. That would be so brilliant.

Spent a fortune on pvc windows in last house, then moved to a conservation area. The previous owner in this house had installed pvc double glazing which we were instructed to replace with wooden windows. I hate them! Yes they look nice, but they are extremely high maintenance, and now winter mornings are here again, we are drowning in condensation, which in turn, leads to the black mould inside the windowns. Hate them! And according to the season, they swell up and stick, so that sometimes you cant open the windows. Oh please can I have my pvc windows back!

We seriously considered hard wood windows for our (quite modern) house, but decided against it sure that it would put future buyers off. so much maintenance. So easy to screw them up (our original pine windows were destroyed by previous owners).

Much more interest than on my thread!

I think there have been decades of deeply ugly replacement windows put in a lot of houses and if uPVC had not been the prevailing material it would have been something else - remember the louvre windows of the 70's? It's not the plastic so much as the awful styling, modern and chunky in older houses and repro-leaded woodgrain in new houses. The Building Regs don't help with their rules on ventilation and fire escapes.

I have seen sliding sash windows of both modern engineered timber and upvc (Quickslide) at the Grand Designs show and you could not tell the difference unless you were close up. Both of them had substantial guarantees. I would prefer timber but I must be the only person I know who gives a damn.

In the UK the market has been slow to catch up with technology, it seems to me that Germany and Scandinavia have had high performance timber windows and coatings for decades and their weather is worse than ours. We have had cheap and nasty single glazed softwood and no wonder nobody likes it.