Repairing original joinery rather than replacing it
The instinct on a refurbishment is to price replacement windows, because replacement is a single line in a quotation and repair sounds like an open-ended commitment. On these estates that instinct is usually wrong on three counts. The first is planning: inside the Noel Park and Tower Gardens directions, replacement is an application with an uncertain outcome, while repair of what is already there generally is not — so repair removes a risk from the programme as well as a cost. The second is material quality. The timber in a Victorian or Edwardian window is typically slow-grown, dense and durable in a way that standard modern joinery softwood is not, and a frame that has stood for a century with periodic decoration will usually stand for another with competent repair. Decay is normally localised — the bottom of a cill, the foot of a stile, the joint where water has been sitting — and is repaired by cutting out and splicing in new timber rather than by discarding the whole unit. The third is performance, which surprises people. Most of the discomfort felt near an old window is air leakage rather than heat loss through the glass, so brush seals in the meeting rails, parting beads and staff beads, together with a properly re-corded and closing sash, deliver a large share of the available improvement for a modest cost. Adding secondary glazing then takes the assembly to a thermal performance comparable with a modern double-glazed unit and an acoustic performance well beyond one, because the wide air gap between the two layers is what attenuates sound. The combination — repaired original, draught-proofed, with slim secondary glazing behind — is generally cheaper than good-quality replacement, better performing than mid-range replacement, entirely reversible, and does not require an application on an elevation where a replacement would.
