Window repair in Franklin, Indiana
Franklin is an old town with a young housing stock. It was platted in 1823, named for Benjamin Franklin, and has been the seat of Johnson County ever since. Franklin College opened in 1834 and was the first college in Indiana to admit women. The town became a city in 1861, and in 1940 Life magazine featured it in a photo essay called “A Small Town’s Saturday Night.”
But the city most people drive through today was built much more recently. Franklin’s population roughly doubled between 1990 and 2020, from 12,907 to 25,313, and census estimates show that about forty-five percent of its homes were built in just two decades, the 1990s and 2000s. The median home in Franklin dates from 1994.
Franklin is toward the southern edge of our regular area. Most of our jobs are within about forty-five minutes of our shop on Hillsdale Court.
The 1990s and 2000s houses
That building wave matters because its windows are now reaching the same age together. A window installed in 1995 or 2005 is somewhere between twenty and thirty years old, which is right where builder-grade units start to give up particular parts. The window itself is rarely the problem. A single component is.
Fogged insulated glass. The double-pane units of that era were sealed around the edge to hold insulating gas between the panes. In lower-cost units that seal can fail well before the frame does, and once it goes, moisture gets in and the glass clouds over for good. We replace the sealed unit and leave the frame alone. See foggy glass repair.
Casement operators. Where houses of this era have casement windows, the crank operators wear, strip and seize, and the sash stops closing tight. Replacement operators are available for most makes. See hardware repair.
Balances and locks. On double-hungs, the balances lose tension and the sash will not stay up, and plastic lock and tilt-latch parts crack with age. Again, a parts job.
Rot below clad windows. Wood windows with aluminium or vinyl cladding on the outside can hide rot at the sill or the bottom of the brickmould, especially where a gutter has been overflowing onto them. We cut it out and splice in new wood. See wood rot repair and gutter repair.
Drafts. Usually weatherstripping, and usually a cheap fix.
The older Franklin
Around one home in ten in Franklin predates 1940. The Martin Place Historic District off North Main Street, listed on the National Register in 1987, has Italianate, Queen Anne, Foursquare and Craftsman houses built between about 1850 and 1935. Downtown, the Franklin Commercial Historic District and the Johnson County Courthouse Square are listed as well.
The original wood windows in houses like these were built from old-growth timber that is denser and more rot-resistant than anything milled today. A broken sash cord, failing putty or a rotted bottom rail does not mean the window is finished. We take sashes back to the shop, repair the joints, reglaze and rehang them, and your openings are closed up weathertight in the meantime. See window restoration.
Repair or replace
Owners of twenty-five-year-old houses are often told they need all new windows. Sometimes that is true. If frames have rotted through or the original windows were not worth repairing, replacement is the honest answer, and we install wood, clad and vinyl replacement windows. But if the frames are sound and the problem is a fogged pane or a worn crank, replacing the window buys you very little beyond a bigger invoice. Our repair-or-replace quiz walks through how we decide.
What a visit looks like
Someone comes out, looks at every window 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 a season. There is no charge for the visit. Glass and hardware jobs are usually measured on the first visit and fitted on the second.
Nearby
North of Franklin we work in Greenwood, Beech Grove and Indianapolis. The full list is on our service areas page.
Roofing and exteriors
We are an exterior contractor as well as a window shop, so if the windows and the roof are both due, one crew can handle both. See our roofing and siding pages, or ask about gutters and doors when you call 317-770-4550.