Window and door repair in Johns Creek, Georgia
Johns Creek is a new city with a housing stock that is all aging at once. The city itself only incorporated on December 1, 2006, but most of its houses are much older than that. Census Bureau estimates put about two thirds of Johns Creek homes in the 1980s and 1990s, and the 1990s alone account for about 45 percent. The median home was built in 1995. Only about one home in a hundred predates 1970.
That means a very large number of houses here are now twenty-five to forty-five years old, with the original windows and doors reaching the end of their components’ working lives in the same few years. We work out of our shop in Marietta and come to Johns Creek for exactly this kind of work.
How Johns Creek got its houses
For most of its history this was rural northeast Fulton County, organized around crossroads communities: Ocee, Newtown, Sheltonville and Warsaw. Ferries such as McGinnis Ferry and Rogers Ferry crossed the Chattahoochee by 1820. The area was part of Milton County from 1858 until Milton was merged into Fulton in the 1930s.
The change came in 1981, when a group of Georgia Tech graduates bought 1,700 acres for a mixed-use office park they called Technology Park/Johns Creek, the first use of the name for a place. The city’s homes cluster tightly in the decades that followed. A few older buildings survive at Autrey Mill Nature Preserve, including the Summerour House and Warsaw Church.
What fails, and in what order
Insulated glass seals. Almost every window from this period has double-pane glass with an edge seal. Twenty-five or more years of Georgia heat and humidity wear that seal out, and once it fails you see haze or streaking between the panes that will not clean off. The usual fix is a new glass unit in the existing sash, which costs much less than a new window. See foggy glass.
Casement operators and double-hung balances. Where a house has casements, their crank operators strip and seize. Balances in double-hungs wear until the sash will not stay put. These are replaceable parts. See window hardware repair.
Rot in wood and clad windows. Where a house has wood or aluminum-clad wood windows, cladding protects the outside, but water that gets behind it, or into the bottom of a sash, rots the wood where you cannot see it. We probe for it on every visit. See wood rot repair.
Entry doors and sidelites. Entry doors with glass sidelites and transoms have the same insulated glass, and it fogs and cracks just like a window’s. The doors themselves sag and lose their seal. Most of this is door repair or door glass repair.
Weatherstrip. A draft around a closed window or door is more often perished weatherstrip than a failed unit. It is one of the cheapest things we fix, and one of the most noticeable.
The little over one home in four built since 2000 tends to need less, usually a single fogged unit or a door that has settled, but the same rule applies: fix the part that failed.
Repair or replace
Because so many Johns Creek homes are at the same stage, homeowners here get a lot of whole-house replacement pitches. Sometimes replacement is right: if the windows are rotting through across the house, or they were a low-grade product to begin with, new windows can be the sensible investment, and we install them.
But if the frames and sashes are sound and the problem is fogged glass and worn hardware, replacing them buys you very little. We will go through the house window by window and tell you which group each one falls into. Read how we decide, or try the repair or replace quiz.
What a visit looks like
Someone comes out, checks the windows and doors you are worried about, and usually finds a few you were not. You get a written estimate that separates urgent work from what can wait a season or two, at no charge.
Glass units are made to measure, so a glass job is normally a measuring visit and an installation visit. Hardware is often done in one trip.
Nearby
We also serve Alpharetta, Roswell, Dunwoody and Sandy Springs. Our shop is in Marietta.
