This window had very unusual housed glazing bars rather than a conventional fixed sash. Sadly, the bars were rotten beyond repair so we needed to replace them. Being Grade 2 listed, they needed to be like for like.

This job is great fun as it involves making up mouldings and matching them to the originals. It’s a perfect excuse to break out some of the more unconventional hand planes or make a scratch awl and do it the old fashioned way. It’s also surprisingly quick to do.

Once the mouldings are made up with rebates for the glass, you scribe in the joints so they’re nice a snug and scratch your head for a little while you work out the best way of jointing the ends into the jamb, mullion, transom and sill on the fixed half of the window. With the glazing bars in place, along with a new sill and the repaired sashes, we were ready for a session with the putty. Perfect weather, temperature and fresh putty make such a difference, especially when you’re up a ladder.

Our last job was to fix the root cause of that leak into the ground floor window (those of you paying attention will remember from last week). A tweak to the gutting and some lead soakers to replace the flashbanding and everything should be good for another hundred years or so.

True to form, Rob remembered to take the before pictures but not the after, so our sincere thanks to the homeowner for sharing their photos!

The current owners had already got stuck into their stewardship of the place and were very familiar and practiced with some of the more traditional building methods and materials. Believe it or not, this quintessential English Country Garden was just lawn not more than a few years ago!

This Grade 2 listed cottage has quite the history. Pebble dashed probably in the 60’s, prior to that it had Victorian brick infill panels between the late 17C, early 18C oak timber frame. So a lovely, very old, very storied building with all the quirks that come with a somewhere of this age.

One such quirk was a finish of the flashing around the Victorian Dormer window which was managing to direct rainwater to the window beneath it. So our first job was to uncover what was happening. After propping the window and removing the jamb, it became clear that a mortise in the oak frame was acting as a channel for the rainwater to run into the window jamb. Jasmine the cat says “I told you so.”

With the frame repaired and the sashes given some attention with our favourite Accoya, we were ready to turn our attention to the dormer window above.

The building was originally an out building of a former manor house and had seen a couple of different uses over the years. Originally a timber frame, various areas had been filled in with brick panels and a nice extension was added in the late 80’s or early 90s.

At this point, we’d normally show you a couple of nice photos of the job all repaired in Accoya, some closeups of the glazing bar repairs and maybe a bit of puttying. However, the hospitality at this end of the high-street was exceptional and we got a bit distracted by the biscuit game. Please enjoy!

This building used to be the front of a coaching in. The jury seems to be out over exactly how old the building is but famously the neighbors have some frescoes on their walls dated as Medieval.

These windows aren’t quite that old, but likely Georgian. Which is old enough!

They’ve been on the receiving end of repairs in the past as can be seen from the nailed on packer at the bottom (probably inter-war) and the filler patch which is probably from the last 20 years.

We wanted to carry out a structural repair without loosing any more of the original timber than is absolutely necessary. For this, we turned to Accoya as it’s properties are ideal for window repairs and very similar to those of the original timber.

We used Accoya to repair the rotten joints, for it’s rot resistance and stability.

A couple of coats of fresh primer and some new putty were necessary and both of these were ready to be fitted back into the frame.