How To Get Better/Cheaper Windows from Europe (to US Job-sites)!

[Music] foreign Portland Maine and check out the window and door package on this gorgeous house man that is smooth on this video we're going to be talking about European Architectural Supply this is importer of all kinds of really impressive European Brands I've used them before in a house that I built recently in Austin Texas but we've got the owner of the company in this video that's going to be telling us all the ins and outs what you need to know to order these really high performance windows from Europe today's build Show sponsored by EAS let's get going all right guys I want to introduce you to Patrick Mozilla the owner of European Architectural Supply that we often call EAS Patrick thanks for joining me today yeah welcome to this job man this house unbelievable gorgeous Window and Door values here now the American Builder audience though we see a package like this there's there's this a little bit of the hair in the back of our neck standing up a little bit like oh I don't know I've ordered stuff from Europe before and it was difficult or hard talk to me about EAS how you guys make it easy I mean you guys have been in business for two decades so this is not your first rodeo yeah yeah I mean we we've done this for about 19 years and I think we're finally getting good at it you know you know windows are one of the most important purchases you make when you're making a house and in this house you can see how important Windows fenestration really is because the windows help you really get the most out of the lot you have out of the view you have yeah and that's why a lot of people are coming to us um and you know ordering Windows um you know from a different country it seems like a really scary concept for sure and I think it's really important to work with a company that can you know kind of guide you through that and and and make it easy and make it uh you know economically viable yeah I think there's a couple of things that are particularly interesting and Drew me to you guys right away when I met you a couple years ago uh first off I think it's really interesting you've told me that almost half your company is stationed in Europe uh where you're sourcing and looking for some of the best products and in Europe This triple glaze super efficient frame this style of window that we saw in door that we saw in this house this is like an everyday occurrence I even went to uh the uh you know the Home Center of Germany and right on the aisle ready to go was a 3050 in upvc uh in triple glaze with all the same values that I think of for for these windows and it was like a you know a normal epic crappy Home Center window this is no big deal in Europe right that's correct Okay so we've got this guy here it's got multiple Chambers you've got this keeping your clear path to separate the inside from the outside you've got your triple pane one two three panes here and then this is the structural piece right here so you've got a structure here here here and here which is going to help us with wind load as the door gets the wind pushed against that then we've got a brush seal here and here and this piece right here is doing is doing this action where you've got this bulb gasket that bulb gasket this one here and that one there so you actually have four seals here plus the two brushes which are keeping the water uh from getting into that channel to begin with you know the window that you saw at the Home Center is kind of an unusual thing because 99 of Windows in Europe are custom made to the masonry openings that you're dealing with all right right now the good news about it is that custom windows don't cost extra right so if you need that window to be half an inch wider it's just half an inch extra of wood or aluminum or PVC or glass right and that's good news uh you know it's you know gets a little complicated when you're ordering the windows you have a ton of flexibility of what you can do you can typically the windows a little larger than what you're used to here and of course Architects love it you know so we see a lot of houses like this where you see you know wall to wall glass floor to ceiling glass and I think that's that's what our products really shine and you've got a range of products and price ranges where this house is an aluminum thermally broken you know powder coated aluminum this is a really top of the line product but you also have some less expensive products like the upvc that I used at my house that I built and finished recently super high performance almost hard to tell it wasn't aluminum and yet it was upvc talk to me about the range and costs and the value performance that you guys bring absolutely so 19 years ago we started with our first brand of Windows right and over the years I believe now we carry six to seven brands of Windows in different materials choices so whether it's PVC PVC clad and aluminum PVC cloud and color foil wood wood aluminum clad and then different grades of aluminum windows and even a curtain wall and over the years we've kind of become almost like fenestration consultant so you come to us with your project and we'll tell you what is possible you know what maybe needs to be designed a change in the design so it's feasible or feasible economically right and so we now have a pretty nice wide spectrum in terms of affordability so we can get you the most economical you know per square foot cost window to achieve really great Energy Efficiency and we can also get you you know a luxury beautiful aluminum or wood aluminum Cloud window as well and and as you as you're going through this process we can guide you through both the design as well as the different material choices now talk to me what that process looks like when you're not in Boston or Portland Maine because you guys are based out of Boston we're only an hour and a half two hours from your job but yet you shipped me a full Window and Door package all the way down to Texas what does that look like for Builders all over the U.S yeah so we really uh it's great to get it as engaged early on so quite often we have architects who send us blueprints earlier on the design and show us the elevation say are you guys can everything be done on this drawing and we look at the living room and say you know you have 13 foot tall sliding doors right up in this living room that's too tall for a sliding door we have to rethink that is there going to be a transom there right that we're going to put a beam across and and it's good to solve this problem like early on in design than when you're trying to order the windows right or we can recommend someone a way to break up a window to really bring the budget down right we're 20 over budget with this window package right here what can we do you know we're tempering the glass all the way down to the floor if we break up this fixed window wall you know with a horizontal bar now we no longer have to temper the glass up above and you may have just saved three thousand dollars in your window package yeah that's right it's interesting to think too you know in the in the news now we've got a war going on in Ukraine uh but Europe's always had struggles with Energy prices being much higher than the US and I think that really has driven what we're seeing here in this house uh being a pretty normal window in Europe but being a little unusual for for us in America if we think of an efficient double glaze window as a great window and yet these are maybe 50 more efficient than the house being built next door can you talk to me about that a little bit yeah at least 50 percent yeah so Europeans uh in terms of the r values of their windows were kind of 15 to 20 years ahead of us technologically and uh you know as a result of that you know whenever we sell Windows to customers we can make the statement you know we think your window is probably the most efficient window in town still about 10 years from now wow you know so you're kind of purchasing you're way ahead of the the kind of the energy chart a decade ahead a decade ahead yeah quite quite confidently right and um and that's good because you know One windows are expensive two window installations are expensive so it makes sense if you can afford it to install the best possible window you can today right so you don't have to worry about replacing it you know anytime soon and um and and with most of the products we sell we we operate at the top of the energy charts yeah talk to me about install you know when we think about these windows and doors on this project we've got a lot of glass I'm thinking these are super heavy how am I as a builder uh going to take a window and door system like this that seems like it's thousands of pounds off the truck and install it I think that's that that's that's one place where we do a really good job as a as a Windows supplier one you know we watch the weight early honest with designing the system we advise on the division of the the panel so the size of the sliding doors based on the the weight requirements when you order the windows from us we worry about how we get the windows to you so we we we we Google the street view of your job site three months in advance and we say that seems like a 500 foot driveway through a forest is that gonna be okay we're going through a bridge as that bridge have the weight limit you know for the truck et cetera it's just great to be solving those problems ahead of time then the morning when the windows show up yeah right 100 a lot of our Windows you know within the five hour driving radius of of Boston are delivered uh with es trucks with our drivers who are also window installers so the person who comes and delivers the windows to you is also an installer so apart from like you know unloading the windows they can all also spend all the time with you and show you installation techniques show you how to maybe remove a sash or purple sash from a frame give you some pointers on taping or waterproofing details as well we do a lot of that believe it or not and and I've been a lot around a lot of your jobs that are installed but having installed one myself I can tell you once we got a window or two in things really sped up and and we were a little concerned at first like I don't know about these uh you know frame uh screw in the side but once we did one I was like oh this is no big deal we just got to change the way we're used to doing it with a flanged window and once we figured that out it was no big deal well I think that this what I would call the standard size not the American Window let's go to the three by five windows so those windows are really easy to install yeah they are still small enough that even the weight of the triple Bane glass is not really difficult for two Carpenters to install and I think they install from inside really easily you can install in any weather you work from the inside of the building you know you're not on a scaffolding you're not in the muddy you know exterior and you can do a really good job doing it we also think that flangeless installation is more waterproof than a flanged one which seems counter-intuitive but with the high performance tapes we have these days you can create incredibly reliable uh connection we had a huge rainstorm around this house and there's no colliding on the outside of this house and I have not seen a puddle anywhere around the house at all right great Point um the biggest challenge comes with window packages like you see in this house so we can see a lot of wall-to-wall glass a lot of floors of ceiling glass almost every window panel would look at is probably over 350 pounds right here this is the kind of job site you really have to plan ahead and work with us on it so we do it when we palletize and package the windows we even have packing plants that we could share with the builders two months in advance you know in this particular case with a little bit of a challenge getting to the upstairs of the second structure in here and we let the Builder know we think you're gonna have to remove a little bit of the exterior wall to get the heavy pallets onto that floor with the Lal and you know when they did that they had the right machine here at the time of delivery and suddenly you unloaded you know 12 000 pounds of glass you know a few hours right and that makes all the difference six tons of Glass on the browser yeah absolutely well I wouldn't say no problem but we try to make it as as easy as possible hey Patrick my grandparents were immigrants from Europe so I have a real personal connection to immigrants and I notice you've got a little bit of an accent uh would you mind telling these guys a little bit of your history in your background yeah I'm originally from former Czechoslovakia I got just two countries now so I'm from Slovakia and I came to this country as a student I I got my college degree here and I started a software company while I'm still in college the company was really successful you know we sold it to a large software company and I was really interested in construction I wanted to build a great house right and so I was you know built show wasn't around yet you know it was a big you know I was watching this old house and and I ended up becoming a general contractor for this house awesome and so I am I'm building this great house I'm trying to do Energy Efficiency I'm trying to do everything uh you know great build a really good house right and when I'm looking at window choices you know I was somewhat disappointed with what we had here in the North American Marketplace and uh uh so my father you know told me to why don't you come back over here have a look at one of the straight shows there's a great Windows being made over over here and I found windows that were far more efficient than what we had here at a really reasonable cost how about that and so I was still uh you know kind of concerned like you know buying windows in another country seems kind of scary right but I looked at the kind of the shipping Logistics that was involved and it wasn't as hard as as uh as a team you know we can get Windows from our Factory you know to the job site in about 22 days yeah it was pretty great and I actually wasn't the customer number one A friend of mine you know overheard me mentioning this and he was building a house it's like can I have a look at those windows I said I'd like to order these windows too so he was customer number two number one I was customer number two and uh you know the whole company was kind of an accident that's crazy and 20 years later or 19 years later here you are yeah providing Windows all over the US yeah yeah we're one of the largest importers of high efficiency European Windows right now and we play a big role in in changing you know how we're going to be building buildings here I think for the next many decades yeah and for my Builder friends watching this I know we've worked on our walls in our installation details and our air ceiling for years and we've had these incred I think some of my friends watching this are building incredible houses but I've always been disappointed uh with my blower door scores and how leaky my windows are and how much if you look at the energy use in the house how much we lose or gain through our window and door package so by going to your products that are 50 plus more maybe 100 more efficient than some of the American counterparts or some of the American codes giant jump in performance and amazing difference when it comes to air sealing that's one of the things that I think is uh really lacking and as a quick for instance I was asking Jason the Builder in this project earlier about wind and water load and we're just going to get pounded on this job and I think you mentioned the windows in this back in the back of this house have a DP rating of what did you say it was 85 yeah db85 that's huge that's way above some of the competitors I just looked at a sliding door system for another client uh for a I would say their name for a manufacturer that's out in the western side of the U.S and they're sliding door packages of dp25 so this is three times better at holding out water and wind yeah so so the DP array thing the air tightness and the water infiltration resistance right it comes out of uh the right thing as well you notice there were a couple of airplanes that flew by this building airplanes becomes really important if whenever you want to keep noise outside of a building it makes a huge huge difference the ability for the window to seal against all of its gas and make reliable connections there take care of half of the sound generation that you that you want from a window yeah and uh you know a lot of our customers they're purchasing our windows in big cities because of energy performance are realizing that some of their greatest benefit once they installed Windows is the quiet yeah yeah that's a big deal it's a big one yeah that's really cool uh it's hard to I'm going to ask you a hard question here and it's going to be hard to answer this one knowing this is a national audience and we're publishing here in 2022 can you give us any price guidance uh on what to expect uh from this style of European window yeah so so we currently sell a wide range of different products and product types within the category so they're categorized kind of by the material the upavc windows aluminum windows and a wooden one of the cloud windows with the white upvc Windows especially with fixed class like what we see here like in the background you'll get the absolute lowest cost per square foot for a really top efficiency window you can be hovering at like 35 dollars per square foot which is really good that's right as you go up the scale you know you go with the PVC window with foil on it the price goes up uh PVC windows and aluminum cladding on it the price goes up a little bit then you get maybe to our lower uh lower grade aluminum windows with a slightly smaller thermal brake you know maybe 70 millimeter window and you move through you know fifty dollars a square foot fifty dollars five dollars a square foot and to our kind of the most expensive luxury uh you know product or uh just the most expensive product the material Choice aluminum windows or wood aluminum clad windows and hovering maybe all the way to 100 or over 100 per square foot but it really depends on the configuration that you uh that that you make fixed windows are about 40 cheaper than operable windows so you can see in this building right here there's a lot of fixed glass in here and that gives you a much lower per square foot price versus the operable unit next to it sure that makes sense so uh I always think of sliding doors on a linear foot price uh so you know an eight or nine foot slider let's say for each linear foot of slider I often tell clients you know you're looking at a thousand dollars a linear foot so a 10 foot door that could be ten thousand dollars worth yeah so we have a few doors which are less than that you can be as low as 700 uh dollars per linear foot okay and and some really large retail aluminum doors you can be over a thousand dollars a limit in front of you guys go we go to about 10 feet okay yeah and that's you can still do that 110 miles per hour wow holy cow 110 that's incredible yeah and one of the things that Steve basic has preached for years having been a client of yours for a long time has been he loves your product because you can get bigger glass sizes uh less frame more glass than some of the American competitors can you comment on that at all absolutely so uh here is also the difference between materials so we might be working with a client that's budgetarily is working on a PVC window package but they for instance want a wall of glass like what we're seeing behind here and they only want to see one Malian back there and we we do the the engineering calculations on it we find out that to achieve that kind of size you really want to use an aluminum Extrusion right and we show them which window it is what the cost differential is uh the really great thing about a lot of the year European primarily aluminum manufacturers in Europe that they are capable of Designing specific window assemblies for us for the specific wind load or the DP rating that we give them so we can say this house requires a DP of 37 and they designed for us every window assembly to that value and if any of our Windows is not satisfying that they'll recommend which design decisions we have to make so for instance a giant 15-foot wall of glass that only had one money in the middle they say you either have to have two millions in here or you have to reduce the height by six inches yeah and it's really great to have the confidence of knowing that this window assembly was actually scrutinized for the specific you know window that you're looking for for this building it makes it it's going to make a huge difference when a category 2 hurricane you know it's going to swing through this area which eventually will happen yeah that's right 100 what do we miss Patrick super interesting to talk to you brother I mean you know there are a lot of companies uh that are in our line of business when you are choosing to to purchase a package window package from Europe it probably has to be a package of a certain size so it makes sense uh you're not going to order three Windows correct correct uh pick carefully like who you work with when you're doing the importation make sure that the company is there not just to sell your windows but also support them down the line that they have the logistical infrastructure to support you through that delivery process and the after sale process as well we think as a company we finally got really good at that uh and it takes a while yeah for sure Big Time Patrick so good to catch up with you man we'll put a link below to Patrick company European Architectural Supply based out of Boston shipping really everywhere in America and North America too you should have been in Canada as well mostly mostly in United States and mostly east of the Rockies okay I'm mostly used to the Rockies yeah guys really really cool company and big thanks to Jason for having us on his job site today I'll put a link to those guys make sure you check out the other video that I made with him full tour of this gorgeous house right here on the Portland Maine Harbor unbelievable what a fun trip guys if you're not currently a subscriber hit that subscribe button below we've got new content here every Tuesday and every Friday follow me on Tick Tock or Instagram otherwise we'll see you next time on the build show [Music]

Channel: Matt Risinger

Views: 117,011

Keywords: Matt Risinger, Build Show Network, The Build Show, Build

Id: fRe-E7VMBFg

Length: 21min 31sec (1291 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 21 2022