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

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.

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

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.

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.

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