Saturday, July 6th, 2024
The new windows are all in, the scaffolding has been removed and everything is mostly back to normal. The guest rooms and breakfast room are fit to use once again. The only major piece of work outstanding concerns the stairwell and its flat roof above it. The former’s outside wall is saturated and will have to be replastered and painted. The roof needs to be recovered with fibreglass to replace the leaking, cracked felt that is beyond repair.
All of Bressenden’s windows have now been replaced save for those in the “new” kitchen, whose 1980s double-glazed windows still have life in them. I cannot overstate what a difference the new windows, both the wooden ones in the East Wing and the metal ones everywhere else, in the house have made. Mettherm’s aluminium replacements for the Crittall windows are airtight, well fitting, double-glazed, multipart locking, rustproof, maintenance-free replicas of cold, leaking, warped, wet (in winter), mould-prone, rusting, single-glazed eye-sores that were impossible to maintain and for which nothing could be done to improve their aesthetic appeal because paint never adhered for more than a few months before flaking off, and the frames kept collecting pools of condensation which encouraged the growth of black mould. Keeping around 100 windows and a few doors looking fresh was no joke. The most depressing thing when running a B&B in winter was the morning routine of vacuuming the breakfast windows which were dripping wet whenever the outside temperature went below 6 degrees. By the time you’d wiped off the last window you had to start all over again because the first window would have already misted up. With these new windows, shown in the photo above, I will be spared this work when winter arrives.
Taking a bathroom window as an example, what looked like this:
Now looks like this:
