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.

Whilst the wood repairs were going on, we took the winch off site for a check over. There were a couple of bracket that had rusted away, but otherwise they weren’t in terrible condition.

We had some new brackets made up and welded on, replaced the seized bolts and re-finished the paintwork.

The last issue to negotiate was re-fitting. The scaffold had to come down for the first race weekend of the year so it was over to the good old ladder to access the window.

With the whole assembly weighing in at over 60kgs, the thought of carrying it up the ladder might seem daunting. However, if there’s anything heavy we’d recommend fitting via ladder, it’s a winch. Just stage your assembly in a logical order and the equipment enables it’s own logistics.

We removed the rotten sills and took precise measurements for the replacements. We made as much as possible back at the workshop before transporting the new Accoya sills back to site to be fitted.

A lot of the paint was flaking, so we removed most of it to give a good base for redecoration. We also removed all the old putty as it was past it’s best. Whilst here, we also replaced any panes of glass that had broken over the years. There was a mix of machine made drawn glass and later float glass, so we replaced each like-for-like.

There were 6 fixed sashes in the first 2 windows. However, the third window had openers. Designed to look the same as the other 2 windows, they opened in the casement style, but inwards. So really they were more like a set of french doors, with a pair of dummy mullions attached. Originally, this allowed a completely open aperture through which hay bales could be winched up from the street and into the stables. We were able to take the smaller “sash” offsite for repair, but the larger double sash was simply too big to get past the scaffolding. Therefore, 6 meters up on the scaffolding, bridging the inner and outer scaffolds, we repaired, reglazed, adjusted and rehung the sash so it functioned perfectly.

The windows are large; around 2.5 meters wide and nearly 4 meters tall. They’re also tricky to access; the sills are around 6 meters up from the pavement outside and 2 meters up from the internal walkway. So scaffolding inside and outside was the first thing to get organised.

From the scaffolding, we could make a good assessment of the windows condition. The sills looked worse for ware, along with some of the sash bottom rails. The glazing putty needed fairly extensive replacement and there were some concerns about the structural stability of the windows in the openings.

We kicked the work off by addressing the structural issues first. The windows couldn’t fall outward as they are fitted behind the brickwork, but with no masonry or decorative finishes holding the windows from leaning in, they had very slowly been making their way backwards over the years

To clear some room, we removed any remedial pointing between the frames and masonry, leaving only the original lime pointing. We could now see that the windows were held in place using cut nails, fitted into timber grounds in joints between the bricks. Over time, several of the nails and timber grounds had rotted so we needed to push the frames back into their original position, re-fix them and repoint to the brickwork.

Fortunately, there was a wall opposite the windows forming a vaulted corridor. We were able to use the wall to fit props and persuade the frames to move tight against the original lime pointing. We were then able to fix the frames firmly into the brickwork.

To finish, we used lime to point up the gaps.

As the external fit of the window was very good, just needed to focus our attention on some minor repairs to the sash first, in Accoya.

With the sash repaired, we could make any repairs to the frame. These needed to be in Oak. We used reclaimed English oak, salvaged from a job just down the road in Bisham; as local as we could get. You can see the colour difference in the wood, but the new will age back towards the original’s colour and importantly, it’ll move and act in the same way as the original oak.

We got the rebate as nicely tuned to the sash as possible before refitting some top quality forged hardware to ensure the window closes tightly and consistently for years to come.