Today, Tuesday the 8th of June, saw the arrival of two replacement triple glazing units, to swop out the defective windows. They had internal scratches between the layers of glass panes so it must have been caused during manufacturing processes, but a third window had a scratch on the outer surface and the glass people declined to swop that one out but on the other hand, did provide a small pot of glass polishing powder instead for us to polish the scratch away.
But before we could do any of this exchanging lark, we had to, on the previous day, work slowly and carefully to remove the oak beadings, four of them for each window and then unscrew the plastic brackets holding the glass unit in place. Next, we cut the security tape behind the glass and with the help of our neighbour and four large handles with suction cups managed to haul and man handle the very very heavy 117.93kg window (we found the weight on a label stuck on the edge of the unit!) and carefully got it onto our medium sized flat bed trolley we had adapted (again) to help hold and transport the glazing unit.
Old-windows-removed
We got the two units collected together near the driveway, ready for the van’s arrival.
Finally, we spent several more hours cleaning the glue and the remains of the tape off the metal frame and got it all clean. We stuck on a fresh line of double sided sticky security tape ready to pull off the wax protective strip when we are about to put in the new Glass on the morrow.
So this brings us to today, when the van arrived just after 9am (scheduled for after 10am) and we hastily got our worksuits on, grabbed our neighbour again and got the two new glazing units off the van, parked on up against the wall on a pallet and then loaded the old ones back into the van for them to take away and one assume that they will analyse the glass panes for their mistakes back at the factory.
Finally, we moved each of the new units to their window holes, reversing the process, with lots of grunts and managed to slip them home and stick them back onto the uncovered security tape. We secured all the plastic brackets back into place again and reattached the Oak beadings back on.
H-window-Replaced
Great-room-window-replaced
The third window with the scratch on the outside (we don’t thick we scratched it) we did after lunch.
Window-C-Scratch-From-inside
We made a thick creamy paste of the cerium oxide polishing powder and dabbed the mixture onto a pre-soaked cloth wheel, fitted it to our electric drill and carefully buffed the scratch for about 30 minutes in total, stopping many times to spray the glass with water to cool the temperature down as much as possible, to avoid creating heat stresses and shattering the glass. We can’t show you the result because it’s not visible (grin)…
So this draws to the conclusion of our windows story, stretching back to last October, just over seven months ago when it all first started!! It got dragged out because of the Covid Saga! Phew!