Drooping Bay Window

DIY Home, at some point you'll need someone to investigate this. Make sure it's a pro.

If it turns out that the window wasn't installed correctly, or the required vertical poles and/or horizontal supports weren't included, then I'd have thought it would be the simplest of cases to tackle the installers on - assuming they still exist...

 

You won't find a price on the internet,if you did I wouldn't use that company,to give a price you need to see the job face to face so to speak otherwise you are just guessing.
Lets say you rang me with an electrical problem,imagine the rcd won't stay in.Now if you wan't a price over the phone then I'd have to quote for a rewire,which could be a couple of grand,because in the worst case scenario that could be what the house needed.However suppose I came out and it was just a faulty appliance,would you then want to give me 2 grand just for me to tell you your toaster is shot?However if I said it would cost £100 and then when I came it did need a rewire,you may expect me to do it for that price,sounds mad I know but some people are like that.
Same with your bay,it could be a relatively minor job that can be done in a couple of days,then again it could be something major that potentially could involve taking half the front wall down,you never know until you get hands on and actually see the job.

 

If it was me, I would call in a structural engineer and let him tell you what needs doing to correct it. That way you will have something to give to prospective builders to base a quote on. Having an engineers report will also give you something to check on your builders quality - if your SE says a beam should be " x by y" and the beam isn't that specification you can challenge your builder.

Plus when you eventually sell your house it is quite useful to show a report to prospective buyers that things have been done properly

 

DIY, if you have got £5k off the selling price, then you should be fine. I can't see why it should cost anything more than that, and I'd hope a lot less.

Certainly, if you can find the original installer, then in theory you should be able to arrive at a compromise - at least if it was that's installer's incompetence.

I mean, what does it need? Props up, window out (hopefully to be reused), proper support poles and 'lintel' added, window back in and render sorted.

 

Definitly get a SE in to have a look, take up the floorboards in bedroom, then he/she can have a good nosey checking the joists running into the bay.

 

Post some photo's if possible when the time come to lift the floorboards, so we can see the joists running into the bay,& how blockwork is done, intrested to to have a nosey.

 

Nooo, at the moment your Building insurance is on very suspect ground unless you declared to them about the structural issue when you took out the policy. If the extreme happens and the bay collapses completely and potentially "could have" hurt someone you can be prosecuted. These are all worse case

In the short term you are risky adding to your repair bill by waiting

 

Good advice,hadn't thought about the potenial problems with his Building insurance.

 

Seen it a few times where a householder had told an insurance company "I had known about that for ages didn't think it was serious" - claim rejected or reduced.

strangely enough I had a lucky escape with a house I was going to buy for the family some time ago - three storey, nine bedrooms £37k! Old house nothing square even the door frames were well out. However, the old paint on the frames hadn't cracked so it handn't moved in sometimes. I was walking round with the surveyor and we both liked the house, saw the potential but felt there was something wrong and backed out of the sale. Two months later new buyer takes over and then the double height bay window disappears into a hole in the ground spills onto the road and takes out two cars, luckily nobody hurt. They obviously had to evacuate the house and the ones either side, then under pin all three houses - I dread to think what the final cost would be and who had to foot the bill and the liability

 

Unless the wall below the downstairs windows has also sunk in to the ground, I suspect nothing has moved there certainly not since the windows were fitted.

I mean, if that top section had dropped a good couple of inches since installation, it would have squished the downstairs windows. Pretty clearly it hasn't.

 

So if you are going to live with it for 12 months why come on here asking how much is it going to fix ?

 

Don't worry about our Sos - he gets carried away at times...

 

If you take up the floorboards you may find that you have 2 sets of joists,If the joists run front to back there may be a timber running across the ends of the ones that are opposite the bay.This attaches to the ones that go into the wall at each side of the bay,then attached to this cross brace you have short joists that go into the bay.This was quite common years ago to avoid the need to get different size joists for different places.

 

Very common.

 

How did you get on? I have what seems to be a very similar issue with my upper bay window. I'm having no look trying to find a solution online, and I can't seem to find a decent local builder who's dealt with this issue before.

 

Aime - best to start a new thread with pictures. There is only one way to deal with a collapsed bay and that's to rebuild it. It's a big job but not massive. If it was me, I'd take it down, build a steel frame and build back round it. Makes the windows totally non-structural. https://catnic.com/products/splayed-bay