Window and door repair in Kennesaw, Georgia
Kennesaw began as a railroad camp. Shanty towns went up near a big spring in the late 1830s to house the crews building the Western and Atlantic Railroad, and the grade up to them gave the place its first name, Big Shanty. On April 12, 1862 it was the starting point of the Great Locomotive Chase. It kept the Big Shanty name until 1887, when it was chartered as Kennesaw.
Very little of the town’s housing is that old. Kennesaw’s housing is young: roughly three in ten were built in the 1990s and another three in ten between 2000 and 2009, so more than sixty percent went up in those two decades. Only about one in ten was built before 1980. The city kept growing after that, from 29,783 people in 2010 to 33,036 in 2020.
We work out of our shop in Marietta, a short way down the road in Cobb County, and Kennesaw is well inside the area we cover.
What fails in a Kennesaw house
A house built between 1990 and 2009 is now somewhere around fifteen to thirty-five years old. That is the age at which the original builder-grade windows and doors start to show their limits, and the specific failures are predictable.
Fogged insulated glass. The most common failure in houses of this age. The seal around the edge of a double-pane unit has a working life, and heat and humidity shorten it. Once it fails, moisture gets between the panes and leaves a haze that will not wipe off. If the frame is in good shape, replacing the glass unit alone fixes it. See foggy glass.
Tired balances and locks. In vinyl double-hungs, the balances that hold the sash up wear out, the tilt latches break and the locks stop pulling the sashes tight. These are inexpensive parts, and a window that will not stay open is usually a hardware repair. Our window hardware repair page has more.
Sliding patio doors. Worn rollers, bent tracks and failed glass seals are common in newer houses. A patio door that grinds or will not lock is usually fixable, and a fogged door panel can often be reglazed. See door repair and door glass repair.
Rot in the trim around the window. Even where the window itself is vinyl, the wood brickmould, sill trim and door jambs around it are often not. Where caulk has failed or a gutter has been spilling onto the wall, that wood rots. It is a wood rot repair, and it is worth catching before water reaches the framing.
Where we come down on replace
Because so much of Kennesaw’s housing is newer, the repair-or-replace question here is a little different from the one in older towns. There are no century-old sashes to save. The question is simply whether the window you have is good enough to be worth fixing.
Often it is. A builder-grade vinyl window with a fogged pane and a sound frame is a glass job, not a new window. But some of the cheapest units installed in this era were not made to last, and when the frame has warped, the sashes have stopped sealing and several parts are failing together, putting money into them is a poor investment. In that case window replacement is the honest answer and we will say so, window by window, rather than whole-house by default. The same reasoning applies to door replacement.
If you would like to work through it before anyone visits, our repair or replace guide and the repair-or-replace quiz ask the same questions we do.
What a visit looks like
Someone comes out and looks at every window and door you are worried about. You hear which ones need work and which ones do not, and you get a written estimate that separates what is urgent from what can wait a season. There is no charge for the visit.
Glass and hardware are usually measured on the first visit and fitted on the second.
Nearby
Kennesaw sits between our shop and north Cobb and Cherokee counties. We also work in Marietta, Acworth, Woodstock, Powder Springs and East Cobb.
