THE ARTISAN CHRONICLES

A Six-Month Plan to Restore Your Home and Build Local Skill Stop looking or waiting for years. Train your Artisan today! There’s a bottleneck in historic window restoration. Homeowners call around. They get quotes that feel astronomical. They’re told the waitlist is two or three years long. And eventually someone says: “Just replace them.” But what if the problem isn’t the windows? What if the problem is capacity? A Different Way to Think About Restoration Every time we run

How a Window Craft Outpost Can Turn a Historic House Neighborhood Around There’s a quiet crisis unfolding in historic house communities across America. Windows are failing. Homes are being written off. Entire neighborhoods are told, “It can’t be saved.” So replacement windows roll in. Demolition follows. And something much bigger than wood and glass disappears. We lose the artisans. We lose the trade. We lose the knowledge that once kept these places alive. But there is  anot

And tomorrow, I’m taking the Sash Factory into a client’s driveway in Hyde Park. We’re going to build window sash on site. Not as a stunt. Not as a demo. Not for social media. To get the job done. And to prove something that matters. Historic house communities don’t need distant specialists. They need local capacity. They need artisans who can show up, set up, make what’s needed, install it, and move on. They need teams.

Recently, I watched a conversation unfold among a group of passionate, capable window restoration professionals. The topic wasn’t technique. It wasn’t materials. It wasn’t even historic theory. It was survival. People were talking about burnout. Feast-and-famine cycles. Pricing anxiety. Emotional exhaustion. The strain of doing everything alone. What struck me wasn’t the frustration—it was how universal it was. Nearly everyone identified as a solo operator. Nearly everyone ad

Why historic windows keep falling through the cracks — and what Window Craft changes. Recently, a simple pricing conversation surfaced something much deeper about how historic windows are typically serviced. It started with numbers. Different restorers shared what they might charge to restore a set of damaged historic windows. The prices were all over the map — some higher, some surprisingly low. At first glance, it looked like a normal trade discussion. But as the conversati

I took a photo recently of a house in San Antonio that quietly says everything about what Window Craft really is. At first glance, it just looks like a handsome historic façade. But if you actually look at it the way an artisan reads a job, you see something deeper: Two small oval windows flanking the front door. A lace-like transom over the entry. Normal 6-over-6 and 8-over-8 double-hung windows above. And gothic arched windows up in the attic that I personall

Zero Competition Isn’t Just a Crisis It’s the Best Opportunity This Trade Has Had in 100 Years There’s a quiet truth that’s been sharpening for me. And I don’t think most people in the historic window world have really absorbed it yet. If there is zero competition in historic window restoration right now… That doesn’t just mean the craft is broken. It means there has never been a better time to get involved in it. Seriously

If nobody is there to stop someone from building a monopoly, why wouldn’t they build one? Why wouldn’t they expand regionally? Why wouldn’

For as long as I’ve been in the trades, I’ve heard the same phrases repeated again and again. “Good help is hard to find.” “Clients don’t understand the work.” “People won’t pay for quality.” “The next generation doesn’t care.” “The skills are disappearing.

Across America, historic house communities are quietly slipping toward a point of no return. Windows rot. Skills disappear. Trades fragment. Well-intentioned repairs fail. And each generation loses a little more of the knowledge required to care for the homes that define their neighborhoods. What if there were a way to stop that decline—not with a one-off project, not with a temporary grant, but with a permanent, regenerating system rooted directly in the community?

WindowFest + WindowLympics (Oct 27–Nov 7, Harrison, AR): Two weeks of hands-on training, real-world competitions, and an artisan community built around the Five Pillars of Window Craft. Come learn. Come compete. Come belong.

From the framing crew to the pulpit, from crown moulding to window sashes, my journey wasn’t marked by clarity—but by obedience. Only now do

How the systems meant to save our historic homes may be silently letting them rot. In the world of historic preservation, good intentions...