As many of you will now know, voting in the National Fenestration Awards has now closed, and wow, what a close finish it was.

We don’t want to give away too many details at this stage, but there are two categories which have joint winners, and the Cool Wall 2013 competition has also tied. But we won’t be saying much more than that at this stage!

Friday was a very special night for the industry as a whole. As well as voting closing in the NFA’s, awards were also being given at the annual G Awards in London. Well done from me to all those who won. I’ll be doing a blog post for Monday morning going over who won what.

It is at this point I would like to “big up” one of the best USP’s of the NFA’s, which is especially important after the events of this weekend. When the NFA’s were set up at the start of the year, one of the main selling points of the scheme was to be that it would cover more than just PVC companies. We noticed that sectors like Aluminium, Timber and Steel were very under-represented in existing schemes, and that was not right. This first time round we weren’t able to keep the Steel category until the end, but hopefully in 2014 we’ll put that right. But we were able to put forward a fantastic Aluminium and Timber category. If an awards scheme is to be a complete one, I always believed that it had to recognise the less raucous and more quiet corners of the industry. Just because they don’t often get rewarded, doesn’t mean that is right.

We have done plenty of things right in this first year of the NFA’s, and we have got plenty of things wrong too. But one area where I thought we did well was to make sure as many parts of our industry got some recognition. I’ll be doing a full report on the awards later on in the month.

Stay tuned next week where we’ll be announcing how and when the winners will be presented to you!