Sash and Trim, Pasadena
Double hung sash, glazing putty, casings, jambs and doors on Craftsman houses that were built before anyone thought about vinyl. We take the sashes out, make the wood sound, and put an enamel on them that lasts.
What comes out of a hundred year old window when you finally open it up.
Most people call us about a window because it stopped working, not because it looks bad. The sash will not stay up. The lower rail has a crack in the paint that goes all the way along. There is a piece of hard grey putty sitting on the sill and nobody knows how long it has been there. The paint is what you can see, but by the time you can see it, the paint is the last thing on the list.
This is what is usually going on inside a double hung window on a Pasadena bungalow of that era, in the order we find it, with what each part takes to fix and what it does to the number.
Original glazing compound is linseed oil based. It goes in soft, skins over a few days, and then keeps hardening for the rest of its life. That is the design. What it needs to survive is a paint film carried a hair onto the glass, sealing the top edge of the bevel so water runs over it rather than sitting in the seam.
Every time somebody repaints a window without touching the putty, the film gets thicker and more brittle over compound that has been shrinking underneath it. Eventually the paint splits along the bevel line, the compound loses its grip on the rabbet, and now there is a crack that lets water straight through to the timber. On a north facing sash that might take a decade to matter. On the south and west elevations, where the afternoon sun bakes the compound and the Santa Ana winds dry it further, we routinely find putty that lifts out in one dry piece as soon as a blade goes under it.
You cannot paint over that condition and get anything durable. New paint over loose compound bridges the gap for one season, then splits along exactly the same line, because the movement underneath has not changed.
The fix is to cut the failed compound out back to sound material, clean the rabbet, and prime the bare timber before new putty goes in. That priming step gets skipped constantly and it matters more than anything else in the sequence. Dry, hundred year old wood pulls the oil out of fresh compound, and putty that has had its binder sucked away goes hard and cracks in a couple of summers instead of lasting a generation. Then the new bed is tooled in, left to skin properly, and only after that does it get painted.
Water that got through the putty line goes down. It collects in the joint where the bottom rail meets the stile, which on a window of this age is a mortise and tenon joint with a bit of original glue in it and nowhere for water to escape.
We check this with an awl before quoting anything. Press the point into the underside of the rail near the joint. Sound timber resists. Wood that takes the point easily, or takes it with a slight squeak and no resistance at all, has already gone. The paint sitting on top of it can look perfectly intact while the fiber underneath is soft to a depth of a quarter of an inch or more.
There are three answers depending on how far it has gone. If it is surface softening over a small area, a liquid epoxy consolidant soaks in, hardens the fiber, and a flexible epoxy filler rebuilds the profile. That combination moves with the timber through a hot week. A hard automotive style filler in the same place will crack around its edges the first summer, which is why so many previous repairs on these houses look like a scar.
If the rot has gone through the rail or has taken the tenon, filler is the wrong answer regardless of how much you use. That rail gets a new section of timber spliced in, or the whole rail gets replaced and the sash re-wedged. It costs more and we will tell you when it is the case rather than burying it.
If the sill under the window is also gone, and often it is, that is a separate repair again. Sills take standing water, and the nosing is usually the first part to go.
If a lower sash will not stay up, nine times out of ten a cord has broken and the weight is sitting at the bottom of the pocket. This is not a paint problem at all but it is the reason we are usually there, and while the sash is out on the bench it is a straightforward thing to put right.
The other common cause is happier and cheaper: the sash is painted shut. Somebody ran a bead of enamel down the meeting rail and along the stops, and the window has been sealed since. Cutting that free carefully, rather than levering the sash and splitting the stop, is a five minute job done properly and an expensive one done in a hurry.
We take sashes out where the stops and the parting bead allow it. Some do not come out without damage and those get worked in place, but the bench is where the good work happens.
On a bench the sash lies flat, the putty line is at a sensible height, the edges and the top and bottom of both sashes can be coated, and the whole unit can be primed and enameled evenly. A sash painted in the frame gets its face done and its edges missed, which is where water gets in next. It also, almost always, gets a bead of enamel across the joint between sash and stop, which is how the window gets sealed shut again for the next owner to deal with.
The trade off is that the opening is empty while the sash is out. We plan around that. Openings go out in small batches, boarded or filmed for the day, and back in the same evening wherever we can manage it. Where a rebuild means a sash has to stay out overnight we say so before we start rather than after.
A house built around 1912 has lead paint in its older layers. Not maybe. The modern coats on top are fine, but the moment you scrape or sand into what is underneath you are making dust that you do not want in the garden bed, the crawl space or the carpet.
So the method changes. No dry scraping into open air, no orbital sander running loose on the exterior, no heat gun set high enough to vaporize anything. Wet scraping, hand work with a vacuum where extraction is practical, drop sheets that get folded inward rather than shaken out, and waste bagged and taken away. The work area gets cleaned at the end of each day rather than at the end of the job.
This is slower and it is a real part of the price on any pre-1978 house. It is also the reason we work a few openings at a time instead of stripping a whole elevation at once.
Primer choice depends on what is underneath. Bare timber gets an exterior wood primer that will hold out. Old glossy alkyd gets a bonding primer so the new film has a key. A water stain or tannin bleed on the rail gets a stain blocking primer, because an extra coat of finish paint will not stop it and the mark will ghost through by the following spring.
Then two coats of enamel. On exterior sash we favor a flexible acrylic or a waterborne alkyd depending on exposure, brushed, with the film carried a fraction onto the glass to seal the putty bevel. That thin line of paint on the glass is not sloppiness. It is the seal, and a glazier who cuts it back flush to the timber has undone the point of the exercise.
Dry time and cure time are different. The enamel will be dry to touch in a couple of hours and will still mark under pressure for days. Sashes go back into their frames with that in mind, and we would rather leave a window unlocked overnight than close it onto a soft film and have it stick.
Priced per opening, because two windows on the same wall can be an hour apart in condition. A sound sash that just needs scraping, spot priming and two coats sits at the low end. A full re-glaze with the sash out, the old compound cut and the glass re-bedded is the middle of the range and covers most of what we do. A rail or sill rebuild is the top of it, and it is worth doing on original wood that would cost a great deal to replicate.
If your whole house needs it and you do not want to spend it all at once, do the sunny elevation first. On most streets here that is the south and the west, and the difference in condition is usually obvious once you go and look.
Call (626) 427-2021 and describe the worst window. We would rather quote and do one, and let you look at the putty line afterward, than talk anyone into a whole house on the phone.
Inmanstories works on the windows and the trim of older Pasadena houses. Sash, stops, parting beads, casings, sills, doors and the odd bit of rotted siding that turns up once the paint comes off. Most of what we do sits in the first four feet of wall around an opening, because that is where an old house fails first and where the failure is worth fixing.
A wood window that has been repainted six times without anyone touching the putty is not a paint problem. The glazing compound has gone hard and cracked away from the glass, water sits in the gap, and the bottom rail of the sash is soft where the joint meets the stile. Paint over that and you buy two winters. Take the sash out, cut the failed putty, treat and consolidate the soft wood, re-glaze, prime the bare timber and enamel it properly, and the same window goes another decade or two. Pasadena runs dry and bright most of the year, which is kind to wood and brutal to the coating on top of it.
We work in occupied houses, on Craftsman bungalows with deep overhangs and exposed rafter tails, on shingle and board siding, and on Spanish Revival stucco where the trim is the only wood on the elevation. The pace is a few openings at a time rather than the whole house in a week, and the sashes go back in the same night unless we have told you otherwise. If you want to see how we work before committing to a house, give us one bad window and judge from that.
Everything below happens on wood that is between eighty and a hundred and twenty years old. That changes the method, not just the price.
Mostly the older housing stock on the flat and up toward the foothills, plus the neighboring cities where the same builders were working in the same years.
Call (626) 427-2021. Tell us roughly when the house was built and whether the windows still slide, because those two answers set the whole scope.
We price openings, not square footage, because two windows on the same wall can be an hour apart in condition. The ranges below are per double hung opening including both sashes, and we put a firm number in writing after opening one of them up.
| Sound Sash, Repaint Only$180 to $310 | Full Re-Glaze and Enamel$340 to $620 | Rail or Sill Rebuild$580 to $1,250 |
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Pick the worst opening on the house, the one whose sash sticks or whose putty is falling out onto the sill. We will price that single window, do it, and you can look at the finish and the putty line before deciding whether the rest of the house follows. It is a small commitment for you and an honest sample of the work.