Ormond Beach Glass · Ormond Beach, Ormond-by-the-Sea & Holly Hill, FL
If the house was built before about 1980 and nobody has touched the windows, this page is about your house.
Call (386) 999-3743A jalousie is a window made of horizontal glass louvers that crank open together like a venetian blind made of glass. They were everywhere in Florida from the 1950s into the 1970s, usually on a Florida room or a carport enclosure, and for the era they made sense: no air conditioning, so a window that opened along its whole height and caught the breeze was exactly right.
They stopped making sense the moment houses were sealed and cooled. A jalousie cannot seal — it is a stack of separate panes resting in metal clips, and there are ten or twelve gaps in every window by design. Conditioned air leaves through them all summer. So does the noise from the road, and so does the money.
There are two further problems worth being blunt about. They are close to impossible to secure: individual louvers can often be lifted straight out of their clips from outside. And the louvers themselves are frequently not safety glazing, because they predate the rules that would require it — which matters at a door-height opening or anywhere a person could walk into one.
There is no like-for-like modern jalousie worth buying, so replacement means deciding what the opening should become. The usual answers are a single-hung or horizontal-roller window in the same opening, a fixed picture unit if the ventilation is no longer wanted, or — on a Florida room that has become a real room — a full window-and-frame replacement that finally brings the enclosure up to the standard of the rest of the house.
The size of the decision is the point: this is a replacement, not a re-glaze. That means it is permitted work, it has to meet current wind loading, and it needs someone licensed to do it. Which is a good thing — the reason a 1962 jalousie can be swapped for something that actually seals is precisely that the rules changed.
Do the whole elevation at once if you can. Windows bought and installed together match, price better per opening, and mean one permit and one inspection instead of three.
Not every old window in Ormond is a jalousie. The other common survivor is a single-pane aluminum window — one thickness of glass in a metal frame that conducts heat straight through. Those are the windows that sweat in August and are hot to the touch in the afternoon.
Worth separating from a related complaint: a window that has gone milky or foggy between the panes is not a single-pane window at all. That is an insulated unit whose seal has failed, letting moisture in between the two sheets. The frame is usually fine and the insulated unit alone can often be replaced — a much smaller job than a window replacement, and worth asking about specifically before accepting a quote for the whole window.
Usually yes — a cracked or missing louver can be cut to size and dropped into the existing clips, and that is a genuine repair rather than an upsell. It fixes the broken pane and none of the sealing, security or efficiency problems of the window as a whole. It is the right call for a garage or a shed, and a stopgap on a room you live in.
Volusia County is explicit that replacement windows and doors must meet the wind loading of the current Florida Building Code, and replacement is a permitted alteration. Whether the permit goes to the City of Ormond Beach or to the county depends on whether the address is inside city limits — confirm which applies before anyone orders product.
That is a question for someone who knows the local market, not a glass site, and anyone who answers it confidently from a website is guessing. What we can say factually: unpermitted alterations are a problem that surfaces during a sale, so if you do the work, do it permitted.
Yes, and it is common. Two practical notes: match the product line if you want the elevation to look deliberate rather than patched, and ask whether doing them in batches changes the permit — it sometimes does.
Written August 2026, and general rather than specific. Nothing here is a code ruling or a permit decision for your address, and older houses are exactly where general guidance runs out soonest — what applies to a 1962 house turns on what has been altered since, and by whom.
This page covers window replacement, safety glazing, and the permitting of replacement windows in Volusia County. Before you spend money, get the requirement confirmed by whichever building department covers your address, and check any contractor's license yourself with the state rather than taking it on trust. Both links are on this page.