Case Study: Swapping a Window and Door for Bi-Folds in Winnersh, Reading
- K&S Bespoke Builds
- Jul 21
- 3 min read
The back of this Winnersh house had a set of French doors on one side and a window on the other, and neither was doing much for the room. The owners wanted the garden to feel like part of the house. That meant moving the opening, not just replacing what was already there.
The brief: reverse the openings and go wider
The plan was straightforward to describe and rather less straightforward to build. We took out the existing window and the existing door, formed a wider opening where the window had been, and put a set of three-panel bi-fold doors in its place. A new window then went in where the old door used to be.
That swap gives the room a much bigger run of glass facing the patio, and it puts the doors where people actually walk out. This kind of door replacement is one of the more common jobs we take on across Berkshire, though most are like-for-like rather than a full rearrangement of the elevation.
Widening the opening meant structural steels
You cannot make an opening wider in a load-bearing wall and leave the brickwork above it to fend for itself. Before any masonry came out, we propped the wall with acrow props from inside and out, cut back the brickwork above the new opening, and installed steel beams to carry the load.
What the structural stage involved on site
Propping the wall above the opening from both sides before cutting
Cutting back and toothing in the brickwork to the new opening width
Setting padstones to take the beam bearings
Craning and bedding the steels in position
Making good the brickwork and reveals around the new frames
Sitting the props for the full curing period before releasing the load
The props stay in place until the mortar has properly gone off. Rushing that stage is how you end up with cracking above a lintel a year later.
Fitting the bi-folds and the new window
Once the steels were in and the brickwork made good, the frames went in. The bi-folds are a three-panel set in white, which suited the existing white uPVC on the rest of the elevation, and the replacement window matched the leaded style already in the house.
Matching the existing glazing matters more than people expect. A rear elevation with two different window styles on it reads as an afterthought, even if the workmanship is sound. On any window replacement where we are only doing part of a wall, we start from what is already there.
The finished result
The patio now runs straight into the room through the bi-folds. The block paving needed a small section relaying where the old door threshold had been, and the new window sits neatly in what was previously a doorway with no sign the opening was ever a different shape.
The whole job, from first cut to the props coming out and the doors being hung, ran as a single continuous stretch of work with one team on site throughout. In our experience that is the difference between a tidy structural alteration and a job that drags: the same people who form the opening should be the ones fitting the frames into it.
We work on projects like this one across Reading, Wokingham and the surrounding villages. The areas we cover page has the full list, and our house extension rescue case study covers a larger structural job in the same part of Berkshire.
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