Window & Door Installation in San Jose, CA

The rough opening is exposed, the sill can be inspected and repaired, flashing goes in from scratch, and the new window is fastened to the structure rather than to the carcass of the old one. It also restores the original opening size. The cost is that stucco has to be cut or siding removed, flashing has to be integrated back into the building paper behind that cladding, and the cut has to be patched. Homeowners consistently underestimate that patch.

Matching the texture and color of plaster that has been weathering for thirty years is difficult work, and the honest outcome is usually close rather than invisible, which is why an elevation often gets repainted afterward. Removal is where the surprises live. On a house with any history of water at a window, the damage sits below what you can see, in the sill framing and the sheathing at the lower corners, because that is where water collects once it gets past the perimeter.

It gets probed before anything is ordered around it. Soft wood at a sill means cutting back to sound material and sistering or replacing framing, and on a bearing wall that is structural work rather than carpentry. Found during the survey, it is a line item with a number attached. Found after the new units are on site, it is a scheduling problem for everyone. Flashing is the part of this job that decides whether the opening leaks years from now, and it reduces to one idea: every layer laps over the layer below it, so water traveling down the wall stays outside of everything.

The sill goes in first as a pan, either a self-adhered membrane or a formed tray, running a few inches up the jambs, turned up at the back to make a dam and closed at both ends so anything landing in it has to drain outward. The window is then set into sealant at the jambs and across the head, and the sill is deliberately left unsealed. That detail catches people out, because it looks like a gap somebody forgot.

It is the drain path. Insulated glass units and frame corners all pass a little water eventually, and the pan needs somewhere to send it; sealing the sill closed converts the pan into a bathtub. After the unit is fastened, jamb flashing goes over the nailing fins and laps onto the pan, head flashing goes over the jambs, and the housewrap or building paper above the window laps over the head flashing rather than under it.

A head flashing tucked behind the weather barrier is a reverse lap, which is the most common installation defect in the trade. By the time it shows up on interior drywall, the sheathing has been getting wet every winter for years. Setting the unit is fussier than it looks. The window has to sit level, plumb and square inside an opening that is frequently none of the three, so it gets shimmed at the fastening points and under the sill where the frame needs bearing, and the diagonals are measured rather than eyeballed.

A frame racked a quarter inch out of square looks fine from the driveway and will not lock, because the hardware is the first thing to complain. The sash gets operated before the fasteners are driven home rather than after. The cavity between frame and framing is filled with low-expansion foam, since standard foam has more than enough force to bow a vinyl jamb inward and bind a sash, and the remedy for that is taking the window back out.

Outside, the perimeter joint gets backer rod where it is wide enough to need it and a sealant rated for the substrate, tooled so it bonds to the two faces of the joint and not to the back of it. Exterior doors follow the same water logic with a harder mechanical problem attached, because a door is a moving part somebody uses several times a day. The threshold sits on a sill pan for the same reason a window does.

The sill under it has to be fully supported and dead flat, so a hollow gets shimmed solid before the unit goes in; a dip under a patio slider shows up later as a panel that drags and rollers that wear out early. The frame has to be plumb in both planes, because a door out of plumb side to side swings itself open or closed and no amount of strike adjustment fixes that. The weight of the slab hangs from the top hinge, so long screws through that hinge into the king stud rather than into the jamb alone are what keep a door from settling into its own sill over a few seasons.

Weatherstripping has to compress evenly around the perimeter, an adjustable threshold is set against the sweep by feel with the door closed, and a deadbolt should throw into a reinforced strike anchored to framing, since a strike plate held by three-quarter-inch screws into soft jamb material is decoration. Several code items settle what can even be ordered, before anyone discusses style. Safety glazing is required in what the code calls hazardous locations, which includes glass in doors, fixed panels next to doors, glazing close to a walking surface, glazing in and around tubs and showers, and glass near stair landings.

A unit ordered without tempered glass where tempered is required does not pass inspection and has to be reordered. Bedrooms need an emergency escape and rescue opening, and this is where insert installations can quietly cause a problem, because nesting a new frame inside the old one shrinks the clear opening and a bedroom window that was marginal before can fall under the minimum after. Changing operating type does the same thing, since a horizontal slider gives you roughly half the clear opening a casement of the same size gives you.

Title 24 sets the energy performance of the glass through U-factor and solar heat gain coefficient, with the required values depending on the climate zone and the compliance approach on the permit, and those figures come off the NFRC label rather than off a sales sheet. Anything that changes the size of an opening pulls in structure: a header sized for the span and the load above, and an engineer where the wall is doing shear work.

The local housing stock makes some of these conversations predictable. A great deal of San Jose went up between the early fifties and the late seventies, and those houses tend to carry single-pane aluminum sliders in stucco walls, with frames that conduct heat straight through and sashes riding on brush seals rather than compression seals. Older neighborhoods nearer downtown hold wood double-hungs that are often worth repairing instead of replacing, because they were built from old-growth material that outlasts anything sold at a lumberyard now.

What a homeowner notices is frequently not the actual defect. Fog between the panes means the seal on the insulated glass unit has failed, which is a glass problem rather than a frame problem, and on many units the glass or the sash alone can be replaced. Moisture on the interior face of the glass on a cold morning is usually humidity inside the house. A draft you can feel with a hand near a closed window is very often air moving through the gap between frame and framing behind the casing, and that is a foam and sealant repair costing a small fraction of a replacement. Somebody should tell you that before selling you twelve windows.