Practical guidance on repairing, draught-proofing and restoring timber sash windows, written by the joiners who do the work. If you would rather just ask someone, our sash window repair service covers all of London — get a free estimate.
Watch a sash joiner start a survey and he will not begin with the sashes. He puts a bradawl into the cill about 20mm in from each reveal, leans on it lightly, and reads…
The uPVC quote is roughly half the timber one. That gap is real, and it is the only column in this comparison where plastic wins outright. Before you weigh any of the…
The usual way this goes wrong: the scaffold is up, a joiner has started stripping paint, and a neighbour mentions in passing that the terrace is Grade II. Nobody set out…
Push the point of a screwdriver into the bottom rail of your lower sash, an inch in from the corner, with about the force you would use on a doorbell. Sound joinery…
A glazing bar is the one part of a sash window doing two jobs at once, holding glass and carrying the look of the whole elevation, and it has the least timber in it of…
A sash that will not stay where you put it. One that rattles all night when the wind comes from the west. One that takes two hands and a shoulder to shift. Those three…
The top sash rattles in a south-westerly. The bottom one has been painted shut for years and when you finally free it, it drops like a guillotine. Both of those faults…
The cold coming off a sash window is not really at the glass. It is a band of moving air across your shins, a second one at chest height where the two sashes cross, and…
One quote says 1.2. The next says 1.6 for what sounds like the same thing. A surveyor has told you your existing sashes are "about 4.8", and the council's conservation…
Stand outside and look at the ends of the meeting rail, where the two sashes overlap halfway up the window. If the stiles of the upper sash carry on past that rail as…