Count the openings first

Why the number comes up so early

A window order is not a service call. Nothing can be priced, nothing can be ordered and no crew can be scheduled until somebody knows how many units are involved and roughly what they are. That is why it is asked in the first minute rather than at the end.

A caller who has not counted stalls there. The honest answer — "I'm not sure, a lot?" — leaves nothing to work with, and the call turns into a promise to ring back. A caller who says "fourteen, plus a sliding door onto the deck" has already moved the conversation to when someone can come and measure.

How to count

Walk the house once, room by room, and write down a running total.

Count openings, not panes. A double-hung window with two sashes is one opening. A picture window flanked by two casements is three units in one hole, and that is how it gets priced — count three.

A bay or a bow counts as its sections. Three sections is three units. The frame that joins them is part of the job and worth mentioning separately, because a bay carries its own head and seat and is not a straight swap.

Count the basement. Small hopper or slider units at grade are easy to forget and they are part of the order.

Count the stairwell and anything above head height. An arched or half-round unit over the front door, or a transom in a two-story foyer, is a different order and a different access problem. Say where it is.

The patio door is separate. A sliding glass door is not a window, is ordered on its own, and is priced on its own. Note it as a door rather than folding it into the window count.

What a house here usually comes to

In Lake Arbor, most of the stock went up in the 1990s to a fairly consistent pattern.

• A detached house typically lands somewhere between twelve and twenty openings once the basement and any stairwell glass are included.
• A townhouse usually runs lower, often eight to fourteen, with most of the glass on the front and rear elevations and blank party walls between.
• Roughly a third of the housing in Lake Arbor is attached, so the townhouse figure applies to a large share of the neighborhood.

These are ranges to sanity-check your own count against, not a substitute for it. A house that has had an addition, a converted porch or a finished basement will sit outside them.

What else to note while you are walking round

Roughly what year the house was built. Most of Lake Arbor is mid-to-late 1990s, which puts the original units near thirty years old. If yours is older than the street, say so — before 1978 changes how the work has to be done.

What the frames are made of. Vinyl, aluminum or wood. You can usually tell by looking at the inside edge of the frame.

Whether any of them open onto something. A deck, a porch roof, a driveway too narrow to set a ladder in. Access changes the labor and it is better raised on the phone than discovered on the day.

Whether you own the house. Replacement is a capital decision and the person paying for it has to be the person authorising it.

Common questions

Do I need exact measurements? No, and you should not give them as if they were final. Every opening gets measured by the installer, individually, because houses are rarely as uniform as they look. Your count is for scoping the job; their measurements are what the order is built from.

I only want to do the worst few. Does the count still matter? Yes, and arguably more. Knowing you have sixteen and are starting with five is a different conversation from "some of them are bad" — and it lets you ask what changes if the rest follow next year.

Does a storm door count? No. Note it if one is in the way of a door being replaced, but it is not part of a window count.