Planning full house refurb and extension in 2024 and trying to sort some of the big ticket items in the next few weeks. The biggest ‘thing’ to buy will be new windows throughout the house, along with four sets of French doors and three sets of bifolds. I’ve had three quotes through and would really appreciate sanity checking from some of the experienced renovation bods on here.
I know these can generate a bit of controversy on here but after MUCH research, we’ve decided on timber-look upvc sash windows for the bulk of the house. We have a really lovely, distinctive heritage property that currently has timber, single glazed sashes throughout (it’s BALTIC in the winter) and restoring, double-glazing and draught proofing them all would be prohibitively expensive and require ongoing expensive maintenance going forward - this from a timber window specialist locally. Back of the house is south facing and, as we’re near the sea, gets a lot of battering over the course of the year with extreme sunlight mixed in with extreme sea gales too. For those reasons, we’d like low maintenance upvc but obviously want to retain the look of the existing sashes as closely as possible, and have accepted basically that we’ll have to pay through the nose for it.
However, I’m still bloody shocked at the three different quotes we’ve had back!! All the quotes seem much higher than expected, but there’s one that’s significantly higher again and I’m struggling to work out if these are fair or if - ultimate first world problem - we’re getting the ‘nice road/house’ tax applied as we’ve annoyingly seemed to find since moving here a few years back.
Three quotes below are for:
27 upvc sash windows (Rose View brand - Ultimate rose collection)
4 timber French doors (across the board we’ve been advised that timber works best for the doors as the upvc frames are too thick for our door dimensions)
Three sets of aluminium bifold (2x3 pane, 1x4 pane)
Quote 1: £99100
Quote 2: £97200
Quote 3: £138000 😱😱 - come to think of it, this last one didn’t even include the French doors as he couldn’t make the timber ones!
For context, the bifolds are roughly £25k out of these figures so windows and French doors are starting at around £75k. Am I going mad that these seem insanely high?! I had an average of £1k per window in mind (none of them are particularly large), but understand that these are high end windows and knew this would creep up, but around £75k?!
I’m going to ring the manufacturers directly tomorrow and try to understand whether I can just order them directly and pay a fitter locally but maybe I’m wrong and this is just what windows like these cost these days?! Would really appreciate any guidance on whether these prices sound out of whack, or whether I’ve just been unrealistic to now?
Gosh that was long, thanks for reading 💐