Putting a window in old thick stone wall

[GiraffeNecked]

How expensive/difficult is it to put a new window opening in an old stone wall? Very thick wall, top storey. There are no windows in that side of the house (1908). And it would be great to put one in. Any one any experience?

Bump

I paid about £800 for a window and doorway to be created in a 'random' stone wall of a old house (think of a dry stone wall), and they had good access from both sides. This was for a finished opening i.e. it did not include the window or door frames. The wall was around 40 cm thick.

Their tool of choice seemed to be a garden house, they would wash some of the clay mortar away and then pull out a piece of stone, if it was a large stone they would run away and see if anything else fell down. The new 'lintel' was cast in place with wooden shuttering and acrow props.

If you have a stone wall of regular stones it will be easier as they can work out where the load of the wall above is going.

That sounds reasonable. We’d have to factor in scafffolding but the access is good. Very irregular stone.

I’ve done it, and the difficulty really is around the access and thickness.

We did openings in walls from 50cm to 2 m in thickness and the difficulty increases exponentially with the thickness and size of opening. For a smallish window a concrete lintel would be fine, but for a bigger opening it should be steels.

If the outside is not rendered you’ll also want to think about the appearance from there. A concrete or steel lintel will not look great. It is possible to use stone in the concrete if it is cast in situ.

Does the wall contain little stones?

We have had these and no builders would touch it for window purposes as I wanted to do similarly.

Very thick walls may not be all large stones. They might have all sorts of stones in the centre of the wall. When a hole is cut in the thick wall it can actually collapse as the weight of the stone above the hole is not supported. On a very thick wall, you need a very deep lintel. Off the peg it won’t be. The cost will be big. Cutting the stone to the right size is also a problem with thick walls.

Could you look at roof lights? Might be less difficult.

It’s probably all sorts of stones. There’s a attic above and roof lights wouldn’t work,

You can put a roof light in where there is an attic above, the builders create a sort of vertical plasterboarded square tunnel (getting wider towards the bottom) between the rooflight and the ceiling of the room below. Does mean you can’t use that bit of the attic for storage any more though,

I’ll store that away for future thought. There’s 2 proper used rooms up there, a study and a bedroom with veluxes. But, they are quite large and don’t go into the eaves so possibly something could be done like that in the eaves.

You could possibly ask a structural engineer to look at the possibility of cutting out a high level window just under the eaves. It certainly needs expert evaluation of what might be possible from a structural point of view.

@Guymere
That's an interesting idea, one may be able to work from the top down. Create the window and fill back in over it.

Get someone with structural nous to advise. I had a good look around a stone cottage village today! I thought of this thread. I noticed a lot of windows were high up in the roof or just below the roof.