Hi all,
My wife and I recently bought a 1923 Colonial with mostly original windows, most of which are totally shot. But generally, we bought the house in part because it is still so warm and woody - we really dislike vinyl, plastic and other modern materials. So we're looking to replace our old wood windows with new wood windows - we're not interested in vinyl or fiberglass (except maybe for the bathroom). I know this means we'll be paying a bit more from the start.
We just had the Pella guy over (their own guy) and he quoted us an installed price of basically $890 per window. That seemed high to me, but he said that with an older home like ours, there basically is no such thing as a standard window - they all have to be custom-made. He could be right for all I know, but that's why I'm asking here. I know you can go to Lowes and buy Pella windows retail for like $200 (before installation), but those are all standard sizes. I don't know exactly how to measure a window but from watching him do it, the measurements I took myself later came out to be about 30 1/2" x 54" for most of our windows. Sure enough, Lowes doesn't seem to show this size on their web site (32x54 seems standard), and the guy also said we have a slope in our sashes that they're going to have to compensate for.
The windows he quoted us did have low-E glass (I don't really know what this means) and were "pocket" windows - I checked their web site and I'm guessing these are the 850 series.
We want decent windows but really what we care about the most is just having wood windows that aren't absolutely falling apart. One good thing about Pella is that they offer financing - even if Pella is more expensive, that tips the scales well in their favor and means we can probably just do it now even with the high cost. But if I can get wood windows for half the price somewhere else, we may have to put off and save. I mean, this was like $8,000 total that this guy was talking about - that's a significant amount of money, especially when it's not even all the windows we eventually need done.
Neither of us is all that handy, so doing anything ourselves is probably pretty much out. We do need a pro to do the install.
Is there anybody else offering wood windows for much cheaper than this, installation included? We're in Long Island, NY if that makes a difference (everything's probably more expensive here). We assumed going through Pella themselves might save us a bit, so we were a little surprised when we got the price quote.
TIA,
Jeff