Meadows villa: the original aluminium windows and sliding doors are 20 years tired — refurbish the frames or replace everything?
Our Meadows villa is about 20 years old and the original aluminium windows and sliding doors are showing their age: - the seals are perished — draughts and dust get in; - the big sliding doors are stiff and one has dropped a bit; - a couple of double-glazed units have gone foggy inside; - some handles/locks feel worn and don't lock cleanly.
Do we refurbish the existing frames — is that even a thing — or just bite the bullet and replace the lot? Trying to spend sensibly on an older villa.
3 answers
Good news for a Meadows villa of that vintage: the aluminium frames themselves are almost always still sound — aluminium doesn't rot, and the profiles from that era are still serviceable. What's aged is all the consumable stuff, and nearly every item on your list is a refurbish, not a replace:
- Perished seals → the gaskets/weatherstrips are replaceable; new EPDM/silicone seated in the frame channels stops the draughts and dust. Cheap, high-impact.
- Stiff / dropped sliding doors → almost always worn rollers and dirt-packed tracks. New rollers + a track clean + realignment and they glide again; a dropped door is usually roller/adjustment, not a bent frame.
- Foggy double-glazed units → the sealed unit has failed; you re-make just that unit and it drops back into the existing frame — you don't replace the window.
- Worn handles/locks → the multipoint (espagnolette) mechanism and handles are replaceable hardware matched to the profile.
So the honest answer is refurbish — new seals, rollers, gearboxes and any failed glass units across the villa in one visit costs a fraction of a full re-glazing, and on sound aluminium it's the sensible spend. Doing it all in one pass (a Meadows villa has a lot of glazing) beats reacting window by window over the years.
Replace the frames only if the aluminium is genuinely corroded/pitted (rare inland, more a coastal issue), the profiles are obsolete so no hardware or glass fits them any more, or you specifically want thermally-broken frames for the energy saving — that's an upgrade decision, not a repair. Hardware standards from makers like Roto are why the mechanisms are still matchable decades on.
Did exactly this on an older villa — re-glazing everything was quoted eye-watering, but new seals + rollers + two re-made units came to a fraction of that. The sliders that felt 'finished' just needed new rollers and a track clean. Refurbish first, replace only what's genuinely dead — I nearly paid for a whole new set of windows I didn't need.
The foggy-unit thing surprised me — I'd assumed a fogged window meant a new window. Turns out just the glass 'sandwich' is re-made and dropped back into the same frame. Sorted three of ours that way. The seals were the biggest comfort win though — no more dust line building up on the sills every week.
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