To hear owner Alison Hardy explain
it, her Amesbury (Mass.) workshop is
actually a hospital for ailing windows.
On a bright day, sunlight streams
through the many windows at Window
Woman of New England, where 15
artisans scrape, putty, paint, and tap
window sashes back into shape and
send them into the next century.
Alison Hardy is a strong—make
that obsessed—advocate for repair-
ing rather than replacing windows.
She’s chairman for the Window
Preservation Alliance, an organization
that advocates preserving original
windows for their beauty, craftsman-
ship, and energy effi ciency. “Original
windows are so much better built than
new windows,” says Hardy, noting that
almost any window built before 1960
can be restored. “You have something
that’s already lasted 100 years. If you
invest in a little bit of maintenance, it
will last another 100 years.”
Typically, only critical cases end up
at the shop. If repair is possible when
the Window Woman team arrives on
site at a client’s home, remedies are
applied right there and then. Broken
panes of glass, dysfunctional ropes,
and faulty locks often can be ad-dressed at the scene. More compli-
cated problems come back to the
workshop—as well as any window
that requires paint removal. (On the
assumption that lead paint is always
present, staffers always use special
vacuums and specifi c equipment.)
Hardy got into the window game by
necessity. In 2002, together with her
husband, she bought “a disaster of a
house,” ca. 1850, with a quirky amal-
gamation of window styles. “Totally
different historical eras were repre-
sented,” she says. When she tried to
fi nd expert help, she found almost
nobody in the fi eld locally. So she ex-
perimented, found that she loved the
process, and realized that she could
fi ll a niche. In 2003, Window Woman
of New England was born: “And we’ve
been crazy busy ever since.”
Repair techniques are the same
regardless of a sash’s vintage. Each
window has its individual challenges,
with the condition of muntins and
frame entering into the equation.
Such variables result in a range of
quoted prices: from $50 to simply fi x
a pane of antique glass to $2,000 for
paint removal, rot repair, and recon-
struction. —WRITTEN BY TOVAH MARTINSHOPTOUR:
“We buy these antique houses because we love antique houses. But once you
start taking pieces away from it, you don’t have an antique anymore.”
—alison hardy, window woman of new englandStep by Step
Window Repair
< 1.^ Working on an open grid bench
so that paint and old grout can fall through,
a worker runs a sharp common carbide
scraper over a window frame.
< 2.^ New lights for an old sash
are cut from recycled antique glass,
which requires extra care because of
irregularities in its makeup. >
FAR LEFT Alison Hardy
can eyeball a sash and
often identify its age by
the thickness and wavy
or bubbly characteris-
tics of the glass.
LEFT In the shop,
Hardy demonstrates a
technique for picking
paint out of corners.KINDR
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