Double glazing your Berwick house: what happens, day by day
Straight answer: 45 to 90 minutes per opening once the crew is set up, so a 14 opening retrofit is 2 to 3 days on site and a full frame replacement is 3 to 5 days. Manufacture before that is 4 to 8 weeks. Only one or two openings are ever open at once and each is closed the same day. Two people, one ute and a trailer, arriving between 7.30am and 8am and gone by 4pm.
Most of the anxiety about a glazing job is not about the windows. It is about strangers in the house, holes in the wall, the dog, the school run and whether anyone can work from the study on Tuesday. This page is the whole job written out in order, with the real durations, the things that stall it, and a checklist you can print and tick off. Prices for the work itself are on the pricing page, and how we work in your suburb is on the Berwick page.
Stage by stage, from first phone call to final adjustment
Durations below are for a typical single storey Berwick brick veneer with fourteen window openings and one sliding door. A double storey house in Timbarra or Berwick Springs adds roughly a day for access equipment, and an old Berwick timber sash cottage adds time for careful removal rather than for the glazing itself.
| Stage | How long | What happens | What you need to do |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Free in home measure | 60 to 90 minutes, one visit | Every opening measured and photographed, frame condition checked with a probe at the sill, orientation and shading noted, access and parking assessed. | Be home, unlock side gates, point out the rooms that bother you most. |
| 2. Written quote | Within 7 days, usually 2 to 3 | Fixed price per opening with the glass makeup, frame system and U-value named against each one, plus disposal and make good as separate lines. | Read it against the other quotes line for line, not on the total. |
| 3. Order and check measure | 45 to 60 minutes on site | A second measure to manufacturing tolerance before anything is cut. This is the last point at which a size can change. | Sign, pay the deposit, confirm colours and hardware finishes in writing. |
| 4. Manufacture | 4 to 8 weeks, 10 to 12 in the May peak | Frames extruded and assembled, sealed units made and gas filled, hardware fitted, everything labelled by opening. | Nothing on site. Do your prep in the last fortnight, not the last night. |
| 5. Delivery | 1 to 2 hours, day before or 7.30am | Units unloaded and stood on edge in the garage or against a protected wall, checked off against the schedule for damage. | Clear about three metres of garage or carport wall for stacking. |
| 6. Install, day one | 7.30am to 4pm | Drop sheets and plastic up, first openings cut out, new frames set, packed, levelled, fixed and sealed. Usually 5 to 7 openings. | Rooms cleared, pets secured, one parking space free out the front. |
| 7. Install, day two and three | 7.30am to 4pm each day | Remaining openings, then the sliding or stacker door, which is a half day on its own because the track has to be dead level. | Same again. You can be out of the house if a key is arranged. |
| 8. Sealing, flashing and make good | 2 to 4 hours | Perimeter foamed and flashed, external silicone tooled, internal reveals and architraves refitted or patched, hardware adjusted. | Point out anything that looks wrong now, not in a fortnight. |
| 9. Clean up and waste | 45 to 60 minutes | Glass and offcuts removed, magnet sweep for screws and staples, sheeting out, sills wiped, old frames loaded for recycling or the transfer station. | Walk the perimeter outside with the crew before they load up. |
| 10. Handover | 20 to 30 minutes | Every sash opened and closed with you, locks and restrictors demonstrated, drainage slots pointed out, warranty documents and compliance labels handed over. | Take photos of the labels and file the paperwork somewhere you will find it. |
| 11. Silicone cure and first clean | 24 to 48 hours, full cure 7 days | Sealant skins in about an hour and cures fully over a week. There is a vinegary smell for a day or two. | Do not wash the external sealant lines for a week. Ventilate. |
| 12. Settling adjustment | 30 to 60 minutes, at 4 to 8 weeks | Hardware retensioned after the frames and the house have settled together through a few weather swings. | Keep a note of any sash that is stiff or any draught you can feel. |
Indicative durations for a 2026 Berwick job. Weather, access and what we find behind the old frames all move them. The seasonal effect on lead times is covered on best time of year to double glaze.
Prepare for the crew: a checklist you can tick off
Everything below takes about two hours in total and it genuinely shortens the job. Your ticks are saved in this browser, so you can come back to it, and the print button gives you a clean page for the fridge.
Two weeks before
The day before
On the morning
Pets, kids and working from home
Stop and ask if you see any of these
Want your own dates and a running order for the house?
We book the measure, then give you a written schedule showing which rooms are done on which day, before you pay a deposit.
Access, parking, power and water
A glazing crew needs less room than a builder but more than people expect. Two vehicles, a ute and a trailer or a van, want one or two spaces directly out the front. In the older streets around Berwick village and the tight courts through Timbarra that is the single biggest hold up, so if your street is narrow or you are on a hill, say so at the measure and we will bring one vehicle instead of two. Parking on the nature strip is not on: it damages the verge and the council can and does act on it.
Inside, the crew needs a clear carrying path from the front or side door to each room, at least 900mm wide, with the corners free. A 2.4 metre sealed unit is heavy, awkward and completely unforgiving of a hallway table. They will use two of your general power outlets for saws, a vacuum and a light, which is a few cents of electricity across the day, and they will want the outside tap for cleaning up. If your side gate is padlocked or the meter box is behind a locked gate, unlock both.
Upper floor windows in a double storey change the job. A trestle setup handles a low first floor, but anything above about 3.5 metres or over a sloped garden needs a scaffold or a knuckle lift, which is $600 to $1,600 and needs to be booked with the same lead time as the glass. It also means the crew is outside your bedroom window rather than inside your bedroom, which most people prefer.
Noise, dust, smell, pets and the school run
- Noise comes in bursts, not a constant drone. The loud parts are cutting an old aluminium frame free with a multi tool or reciprocating saw, 2 to 10 minutes per opening, and drilling fixings into brick, about a minute per hole. In between there is quiet handling and sealing. Victorian residential noise rules mean no power tools before 7am or after 8pm on weekdays, and not before 9am on weekends and public holidays. We start setting up at 7.30am and do not run anything loud until 8am out of respect for neighbours, particularly in courts.
- Dust is the underrated one. Old putty, plaster from the reveal, brick dust from the fixing holes and forty years of grit out of the window track. Sheeting and a vacuum on the tools catch most of it, but a fine film in the work room is normal and no crew can promise otherwise. Take soft furnishings out, not just cover them.
- Smell is short lived. Neutral cure silicone and MS polymer sealants give off a faint vinegar or alcohol smell for 24 to 48 hours. Expanding foam smells for a few hours. Leave a window on the latch overnight and it is gone. Nobody should be using a solvent based product inside your house.
- Pets need a closed door. Every external door is open all day and there is glass, foam and hardware on the floor. Cats bolt, dogs investigate. A closed laundry with a bowl and a bed is safer than the backyard, because the side gate will be open too.
- Working from home is workable with one rule. Pick a room at the far end of the house, close the door and tell the crew which one it is. Ask them to text you fifteen minutes before anything loud. Every crew we run will work around two or three scheduled calls if they know about them at 7.30am rather than at 11am.
- Kids and the school run. The driveway will have a trailer, offcuts and a bin in it. Park on the street those mornings and walk them past the front, not through the garage.
What stalls a job, and what we do about it
- Rain. A wall opening cannot be left open in genuine rain and wet timber will not take sealant properly. If the forecast is bad we call you by 4pm the day before and move the visit rather than start and stop. Light drizzle is workable with a temporary cover; a Melbourne front coming through in a southerly is not.
- Wind. Above roughly 40 km/h, carrying a large sealed unit stops being safe, and above that no one is going up on a trestle. Big glass gets rescheduled first.
- Extreme heat. On a 38 degree plus day silicone skins over before it can be tooled properly and metal frames expand, so we start at first light and stop early rather than seal badly at 3pm.
- What is found behind the old frame. Rotten sill timber, a rusted lintel, or a wall that is 15mm out of plumb. Rot and rust are the common ones in 1970s and 1980s Berwick homes and they add half a day and a few hundred dollars. We photograph it, show you, and price it before touching it.
- Asbestos. In houses built before about 1990, infill panels and eave sheeting around openings can be asbestos cement. If we suspect it, we stop, and it goes to a licensed removalist. Under Victorian work safety rules any meaningful quantity of non friable asbestos has to be removed by a licensed removalist, and no glazier should be cutting into it to get a window out. This is not us being cautious for the sake of it.
- A size that does not fit. Rare after a check measure, but it happens. The honest answer is that the opening gets a temporary board, we photograph everything, and a replacement unit is remade. Ask any contractor what their process is for that before you sign, because the answer tells you a lot.
What a clean site looks like at the end, and where the waste goes
Walk the job with the crew before they load up, and use this list. Glass shards and offcuts swept and vacuumed from inside and from the garden beds outside. A magnet run over the driveway and the paths for screws and staples. External silicone tooled to a clean line, not smeared with a finger. Internal reveals refitted or patched and sanded ready for paint. Drainage slots in the bottom of every frame clear and visible. Every sash opened and closed with you, every lock keyed and tested, protective film peeled off. Sheeting, tape residue and old hardware gone. Old frames off the property the same day, not stacked beside the garage for a fortnight.
The waste itself splits three ways. Aluminium frames go to a scrap metal recycler, and the scrap value is normally already accounted for in your price. Old timber frames go to a licensed transfer station, or to reuse if they are decent joinery, which some old Berwick cedar is. The glass is the awkward part: sealed units and toughened glass cannot go into kerbside glass recycling because of the sealant, the coatings and the different melting behaviour, so it goes to a transfer station as hard waste. That is why disposal is $180 to $450 for a house rather than free, and why it should appear as a line on your quote.
Once it is all in, looking after it is genuinely simple, and the two or three jobs a year that matter are on our maintenance page. If a sash binds or a draught appears in the first few months, that is what the settling adjustment visit is for, and what is and is not covered afterwards is set out on our warranty page.
Where we will tell you not to book us yet
Three honest cases. If you are painting, re-rendering or replacing the eaves, do the windows first and the paint after, otherwise you will pay for the same reveals twice. If a kitchen or bathroom renovation is planned within two years for a room in the scope, leave that room out now. And if the house is on the market, hold off entirely: unfinished make good and cured silicone lines photograph badly and the money is unlikely to come back at sale.
We also will not run more openings in a day than the crew can genuinely close, we do not install in the rain to keep a date, and we do not do a full house in one day no matter who else says they can. What we do install is set out on the windows page and the doors page, and if you are still weighing up scope and money, start with the budget guide or the glass specification guide.
Book the measure and get your install dates in writing
We measure within a few days, quote within 7, and give you a written running order showing which rooms are done on which day before any deposit.