Window repair in Indianapolis’s historic neighborhoods
Indianapolis is home. Our shop has been on Hillsdale Court since 1999, and a good deal of what comes through it is wood sash from the older neighborhoods in and around the old city. Indianapolis has an old housing stock by Midwestern standards: Census Bureau estimates put roughly one home in six in the city at 1939 or earlier, and in the neighborhoods below the share is far higher.
These are the houses we most enjoy working on, because the windows in them are almost always worth saving.
Where the old windows are
Closest to downtown, Lockerbie Square sits inside Alexander Ralston’s 1821 plat of the Mile Square, and the National Park Service calls it the best surviving example of a pre-Civil War Indianapolis neighborhood. Many of its houses date from 1855 to 1930, and it was the city’s first historic district. Just north, the Old Northside filled with large Late Victorian houses in the late nineteenth century; Benjamin Harrison’s home is there. Herron-Morton Place was the State Fair grounds and, during the Civil War, Camp Morton, before it was platted for houses after the fair left in 1890. Woodruff Place, laid out by James O. Woodruff in 1872, was its own incorporated town from 1876 until Indianapolis annexed it in 1962.
On the east side, Irvington was platted in 1870 and was home to Butler University from 1875 until 1928. Its earliest houses are Second Empire and Italianate, followed by bungalows in Irvington Terrace and Pleasanton in the 1910s and Tudor Revival cottages north of Pleasant Run Parkway in the 1920s and 1930s.
On the north side, Broad Ripple was platted along the Central Canal in 1837 and annexed in 1922, and most of its houses went up after 1900, many of them bungalows. Butler-Tarkington got its narrow bungalows along the streetcar line between 1910 and 1920, then larger houses after Butler moved to Fairview Park in 1928. Meridian-Kessler grew fastest in the 1920s and 1930s: foursquares south of 44th Street, bungalows east of College Avenue, and big period revivals to the west.
What fails in a hundred-year-old window
Most of these windows are wood double-hungs, and most are older than anyone living with them. They wear out in predictable ways, and very few of those ways are terminal.
Broken sash cords and painted-shut sashes. A traditional double-hung is balanced by iron weights hanging in pockets inside the frame. The cords break, or decades of paint lock the sash in place. Re-cording and freeing the sash is routine work, and the window opens and stays where you put it again.
Failed glazing putty and loose glass. Putty dries out, cracks and falls away, and the glass starts to rattle and leak. Reglazing is part of every restoration we do, and we keep original glass wherever it survives.
Rot at the sill and bottom rail. Water sits on the sill and the lower rail, and an overflowing gutter makes it worse. Caught in time, the soft wood is cut out and new wood spliced in; see wood rot repair. Old-growth lumber like this is denser than anything milled today, which is why a repair beats a new sash.
Drafts. An old window that leaks air almost always needs weatherstripping and adjustment, not replacement. Paired with a good storm window, a restored single-pane sash is a far better performer than its reputation.
The earlier replacements. Plenty of houses in these neighborhoods had some originals swapped out at some point, and those newer units are now the ones fogging up or losing their hardware. We handle those too: foggy glass and hardware repair.
Restoration first, and the historic district question
Our default in a house like this is window restoration. Sashes come back to the shop, the openings are closed up and weathertight while they are gone, and they return re-glazed, re-corded, weatherstripped and painted.
Lockerbie Square, the Old Northside, Herron-Morton Place, Woodruff Place and much of Irvington are local historic districts overseen by the Indianapolis Historic Preservation Commission, which reviews changes to exteriors. If your house is in one of them, talk to the IHPC before you change windows. Restoring what is already there keeps that conversation simple.
Replacement is sometimes the honest answer, for a sash that is beyond saving or a later addition that was never right for the house, and we will say so when it is. Our window replacement page covers what we install, and the repair-or-replace quiz is a reasonable first step if you are unsure.
What a visit looks like
Someone from our team walks the house with you, opening each window you are worried about, and tells you plainly which need work this year and which can wait. The estimate is written and free.
Nearby
We work across Marion County and the surrounding suburbs, including Lawrence, Speedway, Beech Grove, Greenwood and Carmel. Most of our jobs are within about forty-five minutes of the shop. The full list is on our service areas page.
Roofing and exteriors in Indianapolis
We are an exterior contractor as well as a window shop. A lot of the sill rot we repair starts with a gutter or a roof edge, so if those need attention too, see our roofing, siding and gutter repair pages.