Door & Window Installation

Miami-Dade and Broward counties sit inside what the Florida Building Code calls the High-Velocity Hurricane Zone, or HVHZ. Inside it, exterior windows and doors have to be impact-rated or protected by approved shutters — everywhere in the county, not only near the water.

The products themselves carry a Miami-Dade Notice of Acceptance, or NOA, which is the documentation that a specific model passed the large-missile impact, cyclic pressure and water-resistance testing the code requires. The NOA has to be current and it has to match the exact model installed, because that paperwork is what an inspector checks.

An impact-rated window installed badly is not an impact-rated window. The approval covers an assembly, and that assembly includes the anchors, their spacing and embedment, the buck, the sealant and the flashing. Substituting fasteners or missing anchor spacing voids it, and it fails on inspection.

This is worth knowing because it is where price differences between quotes usually hide. Two bids on the same unit are not the same bid if one of them intends to install it to the approval and the other does not.

Inside, most door problems are opening problems. A jamb that is out of plumb gives you a door that swings open or closed on its own. A twisted opening gives you one that catches at the top corner. A rough opening that is out of square gives you reveals that taper, which everybody notices without being able to say why.

So the opening gets set true, the jamb gets shimmed at the hinges and the strike, and the door gets hung to stay where you leave it. Then it gets cased, and the casing makes the whole thing look deliberate.