Window repair in Speedway, Indiana
Speedway was planned around the automobile. Real estate developer Lemon Trotter laid out Speedway City in 1912 for Carl Fisher, James Allison, Arthur Newby and Frank Wheeler, the men behind the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, as a “horseless city” of auto factories and the workers’ houses beside them. The town incorporated in 1926. Today it is one of the excluded cities under Unigov, still running its own council, police, fire and schools.
The houses tell that story in two chapters. There is a pre-war core of Foursquares and bungalows, and around it a much larger ring of post-war homes built when the population nearly tripled between 1950 and 1970. Census figures put the median year built for Speedway’s housing at 1963, and more than half of it went up between 1940 and 1969. Very little is new: about two percent dates from after 2010.
Speedway is well inside our regular service area. Most of our jobs are within about forty-five minutes of our shop on Hillsdale Court.
The bungalows and Foursquares
The Speedway Historic District, listed on the National Register in 2005, covers about forty acres roughly between 10th and 16th Streets and Main Street and Winton Avenue. It holds more than three hundred contributing buildings, mostly American Foursquares and Craftsman bungalows built between about 1912 and the mid-1950s.
Houses of that kind were built with wood double-hung windows, many of them hung on sash cords and counterweights. When the cord breaks, the sash slams or will not stay up, and owners often assume the window is finished. It is not. A broken cord is a repair measured in minutes per side once the pocket is open. Paint-locked sashes, loose glazing putty and a rotted bottom rail are just as fixable. The timber in a window from the 1910s or 1920s is usually better than anything sold new, and our window restoration work is built around keeping it.
The post-war houses
Most Speedway homes are the brick and limestone ranches and apartments of the 1950s and 1960s. Sixty years on, very few of them still have their first windows. Most have been through at least one round of replacement, and that is where the calls come from now.
Fogged replacement glass. A replacement window put in during the 1990s or early 2000s has a sealed double-pane unit with a finite life. When the edge seal lets go, moisture gets between the panes and the glass clouds over permanently. If the frame is still sound, we replace the sealed unit and leave the window in place. See foggy glass repair.
Worn balances and broken latches. The spring balances in vinyl double-hungs wear out, and the sash creeps down or will not stay open. Sash locks and tilt latches crack. These parts can be replaced, and we do it through our hardware repair service.
Drafts. A window that whistles in January has usually lost its weatherstrip rather than its usefulness. That is one of the cheapest fixes we do.
Rot at the sill. Where an original wood window survives on a mid-century house, the sill takes the weather. We cut out the soft wood and splice in new. Our wood rot repair page explains how.
Repair or replace
Our view is the same on every street in Speedway. If the frame and sash are sound, we fix the part that failed. If a window has rotted through, or was a poor product to begin with and is not worth labour, we will tell you replacement is the right answer, and we install wood, clad and vinyl replacement windows. What we will not do is sell you a whole new window to cure a fogged pane or a broken balance. If you want a head start, our repair-or-replace quiz walks through the questions we ask on site.
Plenty of Speedway houses also have a front or side door of the same age as the windows, and the same thinking applies. We handle door repair as well as door replacement.
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. The visit is free.
Glass and hardware jobs are usually measured on the first visit and fitted on the second. If sashes need restoring, they come back to the shop, and we close your openings up weathertight while they are away.
Nearby
From Speedway we work across the west side of the metro, including Indianapolis, Avon, Brownsburg, Plainfield and Zionsville. 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 take care of both. See our roofing and siding pages, or ask about gutters when you call 317-770-4550.