Historic windows (again)

I live in the Jackson Heights Historic District in Queens in a 1924 construction Neo-Georgian house. I priced out most of the major wood replacement window makers and settled on Trimline, and bought through Windowrama. The Trimlines came in at $650 with 6 over 6 grills, all wood. Without the grill, it was $450. Comparable windows from Pella were $950…giving Marvyn a run for price. We also installed a large Marvyn window.

The install was a replacement rather than brick-to-brick. The advantage of a brick-to-brick is that it preserves the original size of the windows. You don’t have to install a new frame into the old frame,. The disadvantage is that it is costly, messy, and replaces good hardwood with modern farmed wood. Trimline solves this problem with the ultrafit sash, which allows you to preserve almost all of your glass real estate while still leaving the old window frame in. The sash is a rubbery materials that can be adjusted to fit old frames very nicely. It must be measured extremely precisely, though, so you need a serious window installer. If there is any thing obstructing the measurement, they need to take it out so that they can get into the frame and measure it properly.

The quality of the Trimline is acceptable. There were a few visible flaws and the paint had just one coat. You could see the wood grain through the paint in places. There were also a few patch marks on one of the windows where the maker made a mistake and didn’t clean it up. But all in all very beautiful, very airtight, great windows. There was one set of missing parts. That is always a red flag regarding quality control. But a week in, I’m very happy with the windows. The Marvyn we put in in one window is of palpably higher quality, but is only for people who have no budget. But even if we had gone for all Marvyn, we would have had to do a brick-to-brick installation to get as much glass as we have with these windows. Hope this helps!