Our house is only about 15 years old but already all of the windows needed replacing. Last winter, so much ice formed from the condensation I was afraid it would pop the window right open. So this spring when we decided to get new replacement windows, we opted to replace our dining room window with a garden window.
The window contractor that we hired recommended Soft-Lite for vinyl windows. I hadn't heard of them before, but when I checked out their website, I was really impressed with what they had to offer. As I browsed their gallery of windows, I came across their garden window.
After much deliberation we decided the extra expense would be worth it. I'd like to say we wanted to add value to the house, but really I just wanted to clean up the clutter of plants that we had in our dinning room.
Every other window we had work done to involved a replacement window, which just inserts the new vinyl into the existing wood frame. However, for the garden window, the entire existing frame had to be removed and replaced. I helped the contractor and his assistant life the window into place. The three of us could barely get it in place.
Once the window was in, I had to stain and polycoat the interior wood work. The picture above shows this. I chose spar-urethane because it's supposed to be extra good against sunlight damage. I knew this window would see a lot of light.
The picture to the right shows the exterior of the window. It might look a little strange jutting out of the house like that, but actually our chimney is just to left of the picture and sticks out about the same depth. So it all evens out.
Even though I stained the bottom, we decided to get a corian insert to further protect it. We figured if we were going to go through the effort of putting in this window, we should make it last. Not to mention the stains in our carpeting tells me our plant pots tend to leak a little.
When the old trim was taken off of the original window, we discovered that the previous owner must have caulked around the edges of the trim. Removing the trim pulled at the caulk which in turn pulled out some of the drywall. I couldn't put the old trim back up without repairing the drywall. So instead I bought some new trim that was a little wider. Since I was staining the rest of the window anyway, I figured what's a little more staining? The wider trim really makes the window stand out.
The last thing we had to do was trim our window blinds. The old blinds we had were one inch too long for the new window opening. We didn't want to get new blinds since there was a matching blind on the other dinning room window. Luckily we were able to get the existing blinds trimmed by the people that put them in in the first place.
