Choosing Windows for a Custom Home

Once you start building a custom home, you suddenly start noticing all sorts of things about houses that you NEVER noticed before.  From roof pitches, hip roof, gables, colors, trims, etc.  Windows are something I guess I have always looked at, but picking them our for our house was much more complicated.  (Partially because I also had to pick out exterior doors which I was not entirely prepared to do.  Little did I know this would also mean I should know what my interior doors are going to be....Yikes!)

We had given the builder a rough idea of the type of windows and doors we wanted so he included all that in the price quote which in turn means that we have a budget to stick to....or fork over some cash.  

Color - Easy Peasy.  We knew we wanted white.  First decision made...Awesome!

Grids - Knew we wanted inside the glass.  Thought we wanted grids but only on the tops.  I think when we counted we have 47 windows on this house so with that much glass too many grids could get really busy looking.  Kind of like this:

The Prairie style grid is VERY big right now and we really like it, but my fear of being overly trendy on something that is very expensive to undo steered me away from that.  If I was planning on being in this house a shorter time, we might have went that direction.

Because of the busy-ness and since we wanted more of a farmhouse feel we ended up going with a 4 grid, like this:

This also worked well with some of the other smaller windows.  

The only other window challenge was our kitchen window over the sink.  This window over the sink caused us to completely alter our floor plan.  Most ranch plans have the master bedroom on one side and the kids bedrooms on the opposite side with the common areas in the middle.  This typically leaves the kitchen sink on an interior wall.  Jeff really wanted a window over the sink, so we shifted things around to accommodate that.  .The architect just threw in windows that weren't really all that pleasing to the eye so we decided to have bigger picture window in the middle with two smaller windows on the sides. Since this appointment I am obsessed with looking at everyone's windows! 

Then we got to the doors which will have to wait until tomorrow due to some technical difficulties.

The doors were a whole different beast for which I was not prepared.