Door and window repair in St. Joseph

Most door and window problems in this town are repairs, not replacements — and the replacement quote is usually the first thing people get.

The window will not stay up

On an original double-hung, that is a broken sash cord almost every time. The counterweight is still sitting in the wall pocket with the rope snapped off it. Restringing it is a genuinely small job.

Replacing a working hundred-year-old sash because a length of cotton rope failed is the most expensive way to solve a cheap problem. Old-growth wood sash, properly maintained, outlasts most of what would replace it.

Drafts

Before assuming the window is the problem, the usual culprits in an old house are failed glazing putty, gaps at the sash meeting rail, and the weight pocket itself acting as an uninsulated chase. All three are fixable without touching the window unit.

Reglazing is dramatically cheaper than replacement, and on a house where the windows are part of what makes it look right, it is usually the better answer.

Doors that stick or will not latch

• Seasonal binding — wood swells in humidity. Often a minor adjustment, sometimes just patience.
• Hinge screws stripped out — the door sags and the latch misses the strike. Fixed properly with longer screws into the framing, not with a matchstick in the hole.
• The opening has racked — a permanent diagonal gap. Planing the door to match is the fast fix and the wrong one, because it stops working when the house moves again.
• Strike plate drift — sometimes the actual fix is moving the strike a sixteenth of an inch.

Exterior doors

Weatherstripping, threshold adjustment and lock hardware are the three things that make an exterior door feel new without being new. A door that lets light through at the bottom corner is usually a threshold that has dropped, not a door that needs replacing.

When replacement is genuinely right

Rot through the bottom rail of a door, a sash where the joints have opened past repair, or a unit that was already replaced badly once with something cheap. We will tell you which one you have.