The Last Sash Window

Well, it's really time to celebrate, as I have just finished a complete renovation of the last sash window on my house! There were seven sashes on the house and in the restoration of the house we added two more - one in the rebuilt extension and one in the kitchen replacing a Crittal door (where there used to be a large sash); of the existing seven, one was a complete renewal job (the large venetian sash at the front bay) as it was too far gone. I did the first of the other six in 2015, followed by two more in both 2016 and 2017, leaving just the one. I deliberately started with the largest and then the next four were all pretty well the same size, leaving the smallest to last. I'm glad I did this, as I used two larger damaged pieces of glass in the last window, and got them cut to size; one I had managed to crack on removal (grrrr.....), and the other was newer, thicker and not wavy, so having the wavy glass available it was a no-brainer to replace it. BTW, if you want to see the effect of wavy glass, hold it in sunshine and look at the image on the ground - this is why it is valuable.

The window concerned was the front window with two lights, both just one over one, separated by a cement mullion on the outside; this window is for the bathroom/loo upstairs. The top pane on each side is a rectangle with a half round at the top, and I checked with my glass supplier that he was able to cut such a shape (just in case I broke one) but in fact both those came out OK. The top pane on each side was a fixed window, lacking pulleys and cord, and in fact some of it was unpainted - obviously it had been installed unpainted, so had probably never been removed in 150 years.

All my sash windows have needed a complete renovation. All of the latches were solid and unusable, all the pullies except one* were worn out, with huge gaps between the spindle and the housing, most windows were painted in solidly, the bottom half of the putty was usually falling out, and only about six cords were intact out of 24. So the complete renovation involves removing all glass and brass, strip to bare wood, repair as required, paint, fit same glass with fresh putty and refit with new cord, new pulleys and new latches.

I had one issue as three of the weights were locally cast lead (2.1 lb) and one was a standard 6.5 lb iron one, just like the rest on the house. The issue I had was that I could not get the iron one out easily. Eventually it came when I worked out a way of levering it out longitudinally, forcing the gap apart a bit. When it came to re-instating the window, I made a new one out of lead sheet, wrapped around a long plated screw. This was made at the same weight as the others, because I was using the correct thickness of glass; the 6.5 lb was serious overkill by some repairer in the past - that one weight was more than the required weight of two, and of course being on the one side it meant that the window would always have been sticking by being unevenly weighted.

By now I have got a good idea of how to do this job but even so I reckon that each complete window takes about 30 man-hours and an elapsed time of almost two weeks. Although this last window was smaller and one over one (all the others were two over two, with two frames), it is a double window with four frames so took me just as long as the larger ones.

So, this last window is basically done but I just need to re-instate the pointing and sort out the cills; I think I'll leave that for a couple of weeks time. I'll offer free advice on Victorian sashes but I hope I don't have to ever do another. Now, I have work to do on the church opposite in August, so I expect little more will happen on the house this year - the tiles in the hall floor are just about the last major job on the list.


* and that was only found serviceable after I had wrecked the face plate in getting it out!