LESLIE: Mayor in New Jersey, with a stuck window question, you’ve got The Money Pit. How can we help you today?
MAYOR: Moved into a house about a year ago. It was built in 2007. And all the windows – they say on the windows Andersen Windows and I know which type they are. And all the windows only open very little until they get stuck. Then if you try to open it, it gets so stuck that I can’t even close it.
TOM: Well, I’ll tell you what, the fact that you have Andersen windows tells me that I seriously doubt there’s anything wrong with the window itself. I suspect what happened here, Mayor, is there’s a problem with the installation. And if the jambs, which are the side pieces that stuck window slide up and down on, if they were installed wrong so that there’s pressure pushing them inward, that can cause the condition that you’re describing.
I’ll tell you one way that that often happens: sometimes installers will use a spray-foam insulation, like the kind that’s polyurethane that expands and gets really, really hard. Something as simple as that can bend those jambs in and make it hard to open the windows. But I think what you’ve got here is definitely an installation problem and not a problem with that window.
So, to try to get to the bottom of it, you’re going to have to probably open up the trim on that stuck window, from either the outside or the inside, to make sure the window was installed correctly. If it’s too tight in that opening or if there’s insulation pressing on it or if there are shims there that were put in too aggressively and bent those jambs inward, that would cause the condition that you’re describing.
I mean the good news is that an Andersen window is a very good window, so that’s why I suspect this has nothing to do with the window and has more to do with the way they were installed.
MAYOR: OK. Thank you very much.
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