Window and door repair in Sandy Springs, Georgia
Sandy Springs is an old community and a young city. The spring that gives it its name still runs at Heritage Green, the Sandy Springs United Methodist Church was founded beside it in 1851, and the Austin-Johnson House on Johnson Ferry Road, built in 1842, is the oldest unaltered house still standing. Yet the area stayed rural for another century, and it did not become a city until December 1, 2005, after residents voted 94 percent in favor.
The change came with the highways. Georgia 400 and Interstate 285 were built in the early 1960s, and the housing boom followed. Today about four in ten homes in Sandy Springs were built between 1970 and 1989, and another three in ten between 1990 and 2009. A newer wave has added more: roughly one in six homes went up in the 2010s, and around City Springs, mixed-use apartment buildings have been replacing older strip malls along Roswell Road. Fewer than half of the city’s homes are single-family houses or townhomes, and about half are owner-occupied, which makes Sandy Springs a different kind of market from most of the suburbs around it.
We work out of our shop in Marietta, across the Chattahoochee in Cobb County.
Wooded lots and wet wood
Plenty of Sandy Springs houses sit on wooded lots, and parts of the city, such as the hilly Riverside area near the Chattahoochee, still have old-growth forest. That is lovely to live in and hard on windows. Shade means the wood on north-facing and tree-covered walls rarely dries out properly after a storm, and in Atlanta’s humidity that is where rot starts.
Rot at the sill and lower sash. On a forty- or fifty-year-old wood window in a shaded elevation, the bottom rail and the sill go first. If the soft wood has not reached the frame, it is a cut-out-and-replace wood rot repair, and the window carries on. Doing it early is the difference between a repair and a replacement.
Fogged insulated glass. Houses from the 1970s and 1980s, and the replacement windows many of them received later, now have insulated glass well past the age where the seals tend to fail. When they do, a haze forms between the panes. We replace the glass unit and leave a sound frame alone. See foggy glass.
Hardware. Casement operators and balances on windows of this age are often worn or broken. Most of them can still be replaced with matching or compatible parts; our window hardware repair page covers the common ones.
Townhomes and condominiums
With so much of the city’s housing in attached and multi-unit buildings, many Sandy Springs owners live in townhomes and condominiums. The work there is the same: fogged glass, failing balances, a sliding door that will not roll, a rotted door jamb. The difference is that windows and exterior doors are sometimes the owner’s responsibility and sometimes the association’s, and replacements may have to match an approved product. Check your association’s rules before you commission anything. Repairs that keep the existing window, such as a new glass unit or new hardware, are often the simplest route in a building where appearance has to stay uniform.
Doors
Entry doors on shaded, wooded lots rot from the bottom of the jamb up, and sliding patio doors on back decks wear out their rollers and seals. Most of that is door repair. Fogged sidelights and door panels are door glass repair. When the door or frame is past saving, we do door replacement too.
Repair or replace
We install new windows as well as repair old ones, so we can tell you plainly which you need. If the frame is sound, fix the part that failed. If the frame has rotted through or the window was poorly made to begin with, window replacement is the honest answer. Our repair or replace guide and quiz set out how we decide.
What a visit looks like
Someone comes out, looks at every window and door you are concerned about, and tells you which need work and which do not. You get a written estimate that separates what is urgent from what can wait. There is no charge for the visit.
Glass and hardware are usually measured on the first visit and fitted on the second. Larger rot repairs and sash restoration are scheduled once you have approved the estimate.
Nearby
We also work in Roswell, Dunwoody, Buckhead, Vinings and East Cobb, and back across the river in Marietta.
