We become window fitters too.

So now it’s time to get on with the kitchen, probably best seen from this view as you can see the wooden single glazed door and window and how it’s right next to the french doors making it utterly pointless now that the wall is down.

In keeping with the rest of the house we’re going white UPVC, just a simple thingy.

Starting off inside by ripping out the old door and window. As ever its nailed in very enthusiastically. You can see what a tip our back garden is, filled with rubble sacks and the bricks from taking out the wall. Conveniently however, it means we can re-use them for bricking up the bottom of the door here.

And it’s out

Still a nice day and the brickworks is getting there. Took a while to even get started as a lot of the bricks we we’re intending to leave are very crumbly and fell out anyway. We’ve also got some tie-ins you can see running up the wide to tie the two sides of bricks together and prevent cracking. We also measure the window wrong, which means we’re going to have to run some bricks up the side as well as building them up at the bottom.

And it’s dark but it’s done! You can see the patched bit at the end, fortunately the outside of our house is rendered so it doesn’t matter anyway.

At this point, we ran out of time so decided to try and cover up the gap for the night with absolutely everything as it’s bloody cold.

Then we put the window in, fairly easy once you get the hang of the fischer bolts. Getting the glass in was harder. We watched a few youtube videos of people leisurely tapping in the beading with a nylon mallet. Well I’ve got a hide mallet so we thought we’d give that a go, don’t want to use metal and scratch the plastic. So you can see us here attempting to fit the beading and using a tea cloth over the end just in case!

No such luck, that stuff is impossible to fit! We ended up hitting it, and I mean hitting, not tapping, with a full on metal mallet. And even that required a bit of effort! It is obviously a bit dodgy smacking the beading on a glass window which is very close to the glass with a big metal object and while it was going pretty well until the last pane, that went a tad wrong and now has a massive crack across the bottom. Still at least it’s was now fairly airtight apart from the sides which need a bit of filling with expanding foam.

And here it is finished, from the outside. New replacement pane of glass for the big panel which thankfully was only £15, silly but not the end of the world. The render will be touched up later on when we’ve bricked up the other window on the side of the house.