Thursday, September 2, 2010

Windows!

Today the windows arrived, and half of them are installed. I went with a local Maine company that makes a high grade vinyl window. The company is Paradigm and their windows have good energy ratings and all their windows are made to order. Here they are coming off the truck and stacked in the west wing:











If you have looked closely, you, like the driver, might have noticed the different colored windows and wondered if this was a mistake of some kind. He said in his years of working for the company he'd never seen some of these colors, his experience being limited to white and beige and once in a while black. It's not a mistake, I told him, it's a design feature.

The fact is that back when I first had the vision for this little house, I had the brainstorm of using different colored windows as a cool, graphical design feature on an otherwise simply shaped little building. Here's what one of my early sketches looked like:


In this drawing there are many more windows that I finally ended up with, thanks to Josh being my energy coach and the fact that good windows are a major expense in building a house. So, the more you include, ahem, the higher the costs. Common sense eventually prevailed and I removed 5 casements and the two transom windows over the french doors from this version.


But what you can see here is the effect of the colored grid of nine windows which form the living room wall. They are dramatic and already wonderful from the inside - they are ever so much more interesting than a large plate glass window would have been. These will be awning windows, with 5 of the 9 being operable - two at the top outside corners, one in the middle of the middle row, and two at the bottom outside corners.
The upper ones are quite high off the ground and I'll be able to open them in the spring and leave them open all summer into October here in Maine.