In article ,
Tom Woods writes:
On 18 Mar 2007 01:55:35 -0700, "druncula"
wrote:


i have just purchased a semi circa 1870, its in good shape apart from
some heavy decorating to be done. The joining semi has a nice bay
window, as do most of the houses in the road. Speaking to some of the
older residents, the previous owner actually removed the bay and
replaced with a flat window.

Probably done because a new flat window is an awful lot cheaper than a
new bay window!

Bays of that age often failed, and fell to pieces. Bays with
brickwork arches are prime candidates -- the brick arches
push the corners out and slowly collapse, particularly square
bays. If you live in an area where bombing took place in WWII,
then it may have been lost in a bombing raid. Due to the
inherent weakness of some bays as above, a bomb which landed
far enough away not to cause any other damage to a house
sometimes caused such bays to collapse or become unsafe and
require pulling down. Besides collapsing arches, bays often
had much less adequate foundations than the rest of the
house, causing them to move and come away. Bays became
unfasionable and with materials in short supply, they were
often not replaced like-for-like.

A neighbour recently fitted a bay window, copying mine which
was same style 1900 house. His was built as a corner shop and
never had the bay in the first place. By the time the bay wall
had been built to modern building standards (cavity and
insulation), there's very little space in the bay compared
with the original ones. OP might want to consider this and
use an alternative wall construction, such as single skin
brick and timber frame with insulation, to keep wall
thickness down.

--
Andrew Gabriel
[email address is not usable -- followup in the newsgroup]