How difficult is it to put a bay window back onto an Edwardian house?

[matildawormwood]

We've found a house which we really like apart from one major thing. It's an Edwardian terrace and the owners have taken the bay window off the ground floor and made the house flat-fronted in order to get their car up on the drive . Not only that but they've replaced the lovely sash windows upstairs and down with mock Georgian. All the other houses in the terrace still have the bay front and sash windows so it sticks out like an (ugly) sore thumb. In every other way the house is good and it seems realistically priced but I would only want it if we could rebuild the bay and sash windows. How big a job is this? How expensive would it be? The bays all have little tiled roofs. Would we be able to make it look like the rest of the terrace? I'd be very grateful if anyone who has done this could give me some advice.

We replaced a bay that was already there (but falling down). It's not massively complicated but it's not much fun, you have the front off your living room for quite a while and everything in that room needs making good afterwards - the joists all need to be extended into the bay, so new floors on top of that, new plastering, new windows, move central heating pipes if you want a radiator over there. It wouldn't put me off if the price was right (and I was going to be redecorating etc anyway).

Thanks for taking the time to reply...hadn't thought about flooring, and central heating so those are good points to consider.

any competent builder can do the brickwork, flooring and little roof, but choosing and sourcing good windows may take more time. Correct tiles are available as long as the builder understands you require them.

If you are in London you may need stone or concrete windowsills to match the street, and the window may be set to the inner face of the wall (not the outside face like other parts of the country or modern houses) due to a London practice introduced following a fire in 1666.

My sister got one new bay and three flat sliding sash timber windows for £5k. The building works would probably be another couple of grand. Needing a cill to match could apply anywhere.

Please do it though! I love spotting people restoring houses to their former glory rather than wrecking them. Bloody philistines who lived there before. Why would you do that???

We did it - worth every penny - we got a house in our preferred area really cheaply as it had been 'ruined'. People still congratulate us on restoring it to its former glory - opposite neighbours were particularly pleased. The sills and the arches over the top of the windows had to be made - the sills were made on site by our builders but the arches had to be separately commissioned - bit of a pain but worth it as our house is now indistinguishable from the rest of the road. We had to have new foundations at the front to restore the bay, so not to be taken lightly - but can definitely be done.

Thank you all for your replies, I think we'll take another look at the house this weekend and see if they might accept an offer. Ogre do you mind me asking roughly how much the job cost? I know we'll need to get a proper quote etc but just to see if our offer is realistic. Flosshilde I'm shocked at some of the crimes against houses I've witnessed during this search. I can only guess it happened during the eighties!! I can't imagine anyone wanting to do that to a house now. I can't believe you would even get planning permission to totally change the front of a house like that.

Really sorry but I can't remember - it was 7 years ago and part of a total refurb so hard to pull out individual costs. I got a builder to come and price it up before we offered though and I remember it wasn't frightening enough to put us off!

The unfortunate thing, matilda is you don't need planning permission for that sort of vandalism. Not even in a conservation area, unless there is an Article 4 direction on it (removes permitted development rights).

Believe me, there are plenty of people out there who would still happily wreck their house. Our roofer looked at me like when I told him we wanted reroofing in clay tiles, as the originals, rather than concrete. The fact that people in pre-60s houses who put concrete roofs on will find their outer walls bowing out after 20 years seems to have escaped everyone's notice. But hey, we can knock them down then and replace them with volume house builder shite. Progressive.