Window and door repair in Buckhead
Buckhead has some of the oldest and best-built houses we are asked to work on, and a good many of them still have the windows they were built with. That is worth protecting. Original wood sash in a house of this quality was made from dense, slow-grown timber, and with proper care it will outlast any replacement you could put in its place.
We work out of our shop in Marietta and take on work across Buckhead.
Where the older houses are
Buckhead began in 1838, when Henry Irby bought 202½ acres around what is now the meeting of Peachtree, Roswell and West Paces Ferry roads and opened a store and tavern. The settlement was Irbyville until, the story goes, a buck’s head was mounted there. After the First World War, many of Atlanta’s wealthy families began building large houses in the area’s hills, and Atlanta annexed Buckhead in 1952.
Peachtree Heights Park was developed on land bought from the Wesley Gray Collier estate in 1910, with a street plan by the New York firm Carrère and Hastings and houses by Atlanta architects including Hentz, Reid and Adler, Cooper and Cooper, Pringle and Smith, and Tucker and Howell. Building there was substantially complete by 1940, in English Tudor, Georgian, Norman, Italian and Regency styles, and the district was listed on the National Register in 1980.
Garden Hills was developed beginning in 1925 and was listed on the National Register as a historic district in 1987.
Tuxedo Park began in the early 1900s as summer homes for Atlanta’s elite. Its larger lots were divided after the Depression and the Second World War, so its houses range from the original period through the postwar years, in styles from Georgian and Tudor to Italianate and Greek Revival.
The same eras run through Buckhead’s other established neighborhoods, alongside a great deal of later building.
What fails in a house this age
Glazing putty and paint. On a window approaching or past a hundred years old, the first thing to go is usually the putty holding the glass and the paint protecting the wood. Once those open up, water gets in.
Rot at the sill and lower rail. Our heavy rain and humidity keep wood wet longer than in drier climates, so the bottom of the sash and the sill take the worst of it. Rot caught early is cut out and rebuilt; it does not condemn the window. See wood rot repair.
Loose joints and sticking sash. Decades of paint, settling and humidity leave sash bound in their frames or rattling loose. Both are restoration work. See window restoration.
Worn hardware. Sash locks, lifts and pulleys wear. Many can be cleaned and refitted, and where they cannot we find a sympathetic replacement. See window hardware repair.
Doors. Original entry doors and French doors sag, bind and lose their weather seal, and their glass cracks. We repair the door and its frame rather than replace it wherever we can. See door repair and door glass repair.
The newer houses, too
Plenty of Buckhead was built or rebuilt in the last few decades, and those houses have the ordinary modern problems: foggy insulated glass where the edge seal has failed, worn balances, and doors that need adjusting. Those are usually component repairs as well.
Repair or replace
For an original window in an older Buckhead house, our default is restoration, and we will explain why if you are being told otherwise. Replacement is the right answer only when the wood has lost its structure beyond repair, or when the window is not original and was never good. Before you change the windows on an older house, it is also worth checking whether any design review applies to your street. Read more on how we decide.
What a visit looks like
We come out and go window by window, probing sills and rails for soft wood and checking how each sash moves. You get a written estimate that separates urgent repairs from work that can be planned for later. The visit is free.
Sash that needs restoration comes to our Marietta shop, and the openings are boarded or closed up weathertight while it is away. Glass and hardware jobs are usually measured on one visit and finished on the next.
Nearby
We also work in Sandy Springs, Vinings, Decatur, Dunwoody and Smyrna, and our shop is in Marietta.
