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I make oak windows.
What I don’t do is phone up perfect strangers on a Sunday morning and ask them if they would like a free, no obligation quote for replacement soffits and facia boards. I don’t do soffits and facia boards. I might if I knew what they were but somehow I doubt it. If your house has them you probably won’t want my windows, at least not until you’ve moved to a house less architecturally challenged.
If, after reading some of the stuff on this website, you think I may be the sort of guy who might make something you want, please get in touch.
I work mostly in oak. (Actually I work mostly in a shed.) Glass, linseed oil and lime are amongst my favourite things.
This is where I start. Nelson Butler's yard in Horncastle. Some oak trees, recently deceased.
Sawn into boards, stacked and left to air dry for a couple of years.
But this is what it looked like a century ago.
My windows are a bit unusual. I use oak because it is very durable and very strong and looks nice. The durability means that it does not need to be painted or treated with poisonous chemicals. Many people are surprised at this. There is a common view that any wood that is not painted and/or treated with preservative will rapidly rot. Reality is not so simple. Wood only rots if it is wet. Most parts of a window stay pretty dry most of the time. They get wet in the rain but because they are left hanging up on walls they dry out when it stops raining. That said, the sill and lower rails can stay damp enough for rot in some situations. Many softwood timbers that have grown quickly soak up and retain the moisture and provide a good home for moulds. They need to be protected from the wet so keep them indoors - not so much use for windows. Slow-grown pine is not too easy to come by; the quality found in the softwoods commonly used in the 18th and 19th century is rarely seen. Some softwoods, particularly larch and Douglas fir, are naturally very resistant to fungi, and can be used in exposed situations with little fear of rotting so long as they get the chance to dry out from time to time. Oak is even more durable than larch and Douglas fir. It can be used in external joinery, exposed to the weather, and will last for hundreds of years. Take a look at a timber-framed Tudor building. Four centuries of rain and sun and the oak is as tough as ever.
So why not paint the wood like most folk do? Most folk have found their wooden painted windows are rotting and so they replace them with nice, bright, white 'low-maintenance' uPVC windows. What's going wrong? Most paint used in the last fifty years for exterior joinery has been known as 'oil paint' but should perhaps be called alkyd paints. They are very waterproof, keeping the wood nice and dry. Until they crack, that is. And sooner or later (probably sooner than you expect) cracks in the paint layer do occur and then water can get in. The paint forms an effective waterproof layer to stop the moisture getting out again so the wood can't dry out. It stays wet - nice for the moulds. After a while water trapped below the paint lifts the paint right off the wood and it flakes. Eventually and too late you get round to repainting it, or more likely, give up in despair and call in the plastic window man. In the good old days paint was made of linseed oil. This was breathable paint, behaving rather like a Goretex jacket, it shed the rain while allowing any moisture in the wood to evaporate out through the paint layer. The wood stayed dry and didn't go mouldy. More about paint on the Paint page. Technology...bah!
Oak neatly sidesteps the problem of rot because because it's naturally full of chemicals such as tannins which just ain't good for fungi. So my windows look unusual from the outside. They are not painted but left as bare wood. Oak weathers in the sun and rain to a silvery-grey colour with a rough open texture, but this is only skin deep. Below, the wood stays strong and gets harder as the years go by, No painting. No maintenance. Not in your lifetime, not in your grandchildren's lifetime. The plastic merchants don't dare claim that. OK, there are situations where exterior painting is appropriate. A terraced house in a conservation area with every other window in the street painted white. There's no question. But I use linseed oil paint and coloured not the 'brilliant white' that was only introduced in the 1950s.
Oak is strong. Very strong. So it allows a freedom of design. Very thin sections can support heavy weights. Thin glazing bars, fashionable in Victorian times when a single sheet of 3mm glass was used, can bear the weight of double or triple glazing with 4mm glass.
Oak is beautiful. I like to leave the inside of my windows with the wood bare, planed smooth by hand to leave a glassy surface not quite flat. Lively to the touch. Tung oil rubbed in, a rub with the finest zirconium grit, more tung oil. You'd be crazy to want to paint such a beautiful wood.
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A Hazard Don’t expect normal behaviour from visiting friends. Don’t expect a hug and a kiss on both cheeks, twice, and “It’s great to see you. It’s been Ages. Gosh, you’re looking good”. Instead your guest will catch a glimpse of satin oiled sheen, rush straight past you to the light and, augmenting sight with gentle touch, caress the timber to detect with fingers what can’t be seen with eyes, a surface silky-smooth yet not quite flat.
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Sash Windows - work in progress... |
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...and a few days later.
This window is double glazed with 4-16-4 mm insulated glazed units. The argon fill, low-emissivity coating and insulated spacers contribute to give a centre pane U-value of about 1.4 To accommodate the sealed units, glazing bars have to be just over 3 cm across, more Queen Anne than Victorian. |
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Here are a couple of views of another top hung sash, but this is single glazed, with hand made mouth blown cylinder glass, so allowing fixing with putty in thin glazing bars. It is painted on the outside with real linseed oil paint and the timber just oiled on the inside. |
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But of course life is complicated. Single glazing is good at letting the warmth out. And that's warmth that was probably produced by burning fossil fuels and adding carbon dioxide to the air. A bad thing. And then there's the Law. Building Regulations pretty much ensure that replacement windows are double glazed, unless the house is of historic or architectural significance. That usually means a listed building or within a Conservation Area.
| But if yours is a 1980s bungalow something like this might be more appropriate. That's where these went. Oooh, the originals didn't last very long did they? |
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This kitchen window opens sideways the two halves sliding
past each other. Usually with a 'Yorkshire Sash' one half is fixed and
only one sash slides but we wanted a maximum of choice over ventilation
options. Sometimes you just have to get rid of the burnt toast smoke
without blowing the gas out. It is triple glazed with three layers of 3mm rolled glass recycled from an old greenhouse, with air gaps of 15mm. The glazing bars are about 20mm across. These are not the conventional sealed dg units so the glazing bars can be much thinner than is often thought possible. The brass fitting that locks the two sashes shut was made by Arthur Needham. Pity you can't really see it in the picture but its very nice. Honest. Must get a lampshade one day. Downlighters and spots are so... last season. |
| This double casement with central mullion has heavy brass bulb-ended sash fasteners and stays from Carlisle Brass. |
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| While this rat-tail casement fastener and stay, in hand wrought black iron, were supplied by Architectural Ironmongery |
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Sometimes my windows are put in places with quite a view. A large part of Cambridgeshire can be seen from this one, a view made all the more exciting by the subtle flaws in the hand made mouth blown cylinder glass from Poland, supplied by Tatra Glass of Loughborough. It is a 'Yorkshire Sash', oak of course, painted with linseed oil paint on the outside and just oiled indoors. |
| Here it is, down on terra firma, before being installed in this 18th century windmill. In all, the mill has seventeen such windows, all slightly different sizes. |
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You don't need a windmill to have Yorkshire sashes. These were put into a Victorian end of terrace, within a Conservation Area, to replace something unmentionable from the late 20th century. They are single glazed with recycled drawn glass and have secondary glazing, invisible from outside and almost unseen inside, formed by sheets of unframed toughened glass that slide horizontally in the same manner as the main sash. |
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Locks
“Window Locks. It is estimated that 60% off burglaries are made by entry through unlocked windows and doors.” This was on a poster in Homebase over the home security section. The spare ‘f’ attracted my attention but then I wondered what it really meant. Assuming that the other 40% of burglars didn’t break through the wall or climb down the chimney we have to accept that they got through locked doors and windows. OK, confronted with the choice, the burglar will open an unlocked door or window rather than break through a locked one but it doesn’t mean your house is more likely to be burgled. Burglars aren’t deterred by locks; they just do more damage when they meet one. Closing a window with a simple fastener will stop the opportunist kid who’s not come tooled up but spending money in Homebase may not increase your security. Anyway, the locks just don’t do anything to enhance the beauty of the windows. So I leave them out. Except that my customers then tell me, "Oh, but the insurance company says my Home-protect-an-entertainment-system Policy will be invalidated if I don't have five lever Euro locks and an armed guard on every window and catflap. Is there collusion between the insurance industry and the ironmongery trade? Would the crime rate be higher if no one had locks, at all?
And on the subject of window ironmongery (well brassmongary – take care with ferrous metals on oak please), this is one area where the advice ‘you get what you pay for’ breaks down. Prices vary extraordinarily and there is little correlation between price and quality. I once checked with a supplier whether there was a misprint in the advertised price of some brass stormproof hinges. “Should that have been for ten rather than each?” “No, that’s the price for one.” I bought elsewhere at a tenth the price. It really was an identical product.
organic [ör-gan’ik] adj of design, etc, based on or inspired by, natural forms; governed in its formation or development by inherent or natural factors rather than by a predetermined plan
Contact: biff@biffvernon.freeserve.co.uk
Lincolnshire
©Biff Vernon 2004, 2006
