Woodvine Dr, Spring Branch: Black Frames on a Rebuilt Lot

Where this is

Woodvine Dr sits in ZIP code 77055, in the Spring Branch district of west Houston, Harris County. Spring Branch is the wedge bounded roughly by Interstate 10 to the south, Beltway 8 to the west and Loop 610 to the east, and it is almost entirely inside the Houston city limits, which matters for permitting in a way that Bellaire or Hunters Creek does not.

As with every job on this site we publish the street, the city, the ZIP and the county, and we do not publish the house number or the owner’s name.

Spring Branch is replacing itself, one lot at a time

The district filled up after the war with one-story brick houses on wide lots, built for the families that filled the school district. Those houses are now sixty and seventy years old, and for the last fifteen years they have been coming down one at a time and going back up taller. You can see it in the photographs from this job: the neighboring roofline behind the fence is the old Spring Branch, single story and close to the ground. This house is what replaces it.

That gives 77055 two completely different customers on the same street. One is a builder or an owner rebuilding, who needs a window schedule for a house that does not exist yet. The other is the neighbor who is staying put in the original house, and whose question is not which window to buy but whether the one they have is worth saving. If that is you, the two pages worth your time are repair or replace and why a window fogs from the inside, and neither of them tries to sell you a house full of glass.

What the photographs show

Black frames throughout, which on this house is doing structural-looking work rather than decorative work. The rear elevation carries a multi-panel slider onto the covered patio with tall fixed panes either side of it, and the upper floor runs a band of glazing across the back. Inside, the openings are generous and square-shouldered, with the frame width kept down so the glass reads as the wall rather than as a hole in it.

If you are choosing for a house like this, the decision is between our vinyl tier and our aluminum tier, and it is genuinely not obvious which wins. Vinyl insulates better for the money on ordinary punched openings, which is most of any house. Aluminum earns its premium where the opening is wide and the frame has to stay slim, which is usually the back wall and the patio slider. Both arguments are laid out on compare windows, and the sliding doors split the same way, between vinyl sliding doors and aluminum sliding doors.

What we have not confirmed, and why we are saying so

Two things on this job are not settled, and both of them are things a competitor would simply have written down.

Whether this was a rebuild or a replacement. Our own records call it a remodel. The photographs are of a new two-story house with new brick, new stucco and fresh sod. Those can both be true, because a Houston builder will call a full teardown and rebuild a remodel, but they can also mean our record is loose. We have asked. Until somebody who was on the job answers, this page is not going to tell you how the work was sequenced, because sequencing is the one thing that genuinely differs between the two and it is not visible in a finished photograph.

Which product line is in the frames. Black is a finish, not a material, and you cannot tell aluminum from vinyl in a photograph at this distance. We are not going to guess, because a specification we guessed once makes every specification on this site something you have to check.

The address is confirmed, the scope is confirmed, and the photographs are ours. What is on this page is the part we can stand behind. If you want the same look on your own house, the useful next step is not to reverse-engineer this one: call (832) 681-9190 or ask for a free measure and we will specify it properly for your openings.