Buying a replacement window is an excellent value improvement for your home, and there are lots of little ways to ensure the best fit and finish of the product.

When your window company comes and talks to you about your purchase, be sure to ask them how they handle the interior of your house. Particularly, how do they handle your window treatments, such as drapes, mini blinds, plantation shutters, and trim. These are key areas to ensuring you have the best fit and finish possible.

Replacement Window Treatments

There’s a way to take the window treatments off and put them back on that gives them the best fit possible.

You see, when your house was originally constructed, they likely used builder-grade windows. These are thin with wide, fat frames. It’s a cheaper product and homes need wider frames for structural integrity. But the windows are thinner and without double pane in most cases. The new replacement window is generally an inch thicker, so it protrudes into the interior space of your home a bit more.

So if you have mini blinds attached to the window, they usually fit flush to the walls. But with the thicker new windows, they may stick out into the room a bit. About 75-80% of the time we can reuse them—we recently did a family member’s house with plantation shutters, and those went back on with no problem at all. But in some cases, you may have to get new window treatments. Faux vinyl two-inch blinds generally work, and they’re relatively inexpensive at Home Depot.

Replacing the blinds might run about $80, and a complete full-frame replacement window is $500-700 per window.

Tricks to Interior Window Trim

There are several tricks that can be used in the interior of the house. When we put the decorative trim and casing back on, we can replace that as needed. Energy Pro has expert carpenters who will make all the angled cuts needed to ensure the fit is perfect. And we’ll use primed ready-to-paint material. When we nail that finish in with trim nails, we’ll put caulk on there that’s also easy to paint. We leave everything ready for you or your professional painter to apply the final polish.

Insulating Replacement Windows

Another thing that can affect the fit of your window treatments is a change in window insulation. When windows are replaced, there is a tiny gap around it that allows us to square up and level the window properly. Older windows may have thin vinyl trim that hides this gap, or a thin ¼-1/2-inch piece of wood.

We’ve used wood inserts and caulk in the past, but it doesn’t look quite as good. We also didn’t get good results from spray foam that expanded.

We make sure we have a great insulation seal before the trim goes in. We used the pink fiberglass material for years, tucked around the window frame because we didn’t get good results from spray foam.

Now we have a great, modern version of foam that is a much better product. Spray foam is going to be required on new construction. It provides vapor, moisture, insect barrier, and they’ve really improved it so it seals and insulates your windows without expanding at all.

Hire Window Replacement Experts

Energy Pro is Kansas City’s premier provider of windows and siding. Our contractors have a combined experience of 125 years. We bring you affordable options with top quality materials and professional installation.

New windows improve the look of your home, and ours come with a transferable lifetime guarantee that really increases the value of your home too. Click here to get a free replacement window quote today!