When you are buying your new home from a builder, like we did, you have to make sure to ask the right questions. One of these things that we wished we had asked about in advance, would have been which/how many windows in the house can be opened.

This is something that I have been planning to write about for a while now. When we bought our house, we never thought about how many windows could actually be opened. Apparently the Mattamy policy is that one window per room will open. At least this is how it was for our townhouse.

So this actually also means that if you have a combined living and dining room, there should be two windows in there that can be opened. And of course do not expect them to use high quality windows - it seems to be considered normal to feel a draft around some of the windows in the winter time.

I am now wondering if you could actually pick in advance which windows would be the ones that open, or at least find out about the builder's plans. But then again, it is kind of hard to pick before the house is built, because it would be hard to picture the entire situation with regards to light and wind.

Our windows were all put in fine with one exception - in the master bedroom the contractors had originally put in two windows that opened. We first noticed that the window in the ensuite did not open, so we reported this to the builder. Unfortunately this was early enough in the process for them to just take out the window from the master bedroom and put it in the ensuite. Sometimes I wonder if we would have had an extra window that opened had we waited a bit longer, because it would have been too much work to move the extra one from the master bedroom to the ensuite.