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.

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.

Some work you have to ease into. These radiused transoms from the Centro Espanol building in West Tampa exemplify that statement. Like...

Our work on West Tampa's Centro Espanol building continues this week. We've moved onto the second floor - and these amazing door units,...

We’re working on an amazing project right now – the wood windows at West Tampa’s Centro Espanol building. It’s always interesting...

Turns out that taking your nine year old (Kolten) to the shop to help with making wood windows is a lot of fun! Being in the middle of a...

An order for twenty eight window sash, fourteen 8 lites and fourteen 2 lites, is an excellent opportunity to let our readers in on as...

A dedicated tenoning station was one of first of my dedicated tool assemblies. The need arose out the delays inherent in changing set...

What tools will I need to make a sash? As few as possible. The idea is to be as productive as possible in as little space and as little time

Window making in 2021 is all but dead unless you are a big fat corporation. And their windows are designed to fail. And they make them so...

Because there aren’t any thunder storms lol! Its the big secret window replacement companies don’t want you to know. Why? They make...

Some people are just great at puzzles. And they love them... Those kids who can solve a Rubik's cube is under a minute? Geniuses. Steve...

Ok. Fair enough. Your “Job” is not who you are. It doesn’t define you. You are something greater, something more substantial. ...

But why we're doing it anyway! True innovation takes a long time, sometimes months, years, decades or even centuries to make significant...

Making Tenons. There's a whole bunch of ways to make them, but none simpler and quicker than this. There was a time long ago when tenons...

How long would it take you to restore the five windows I just agreed to restore? I'm going to try to get it done in six days. I might...