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

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?

Across every historic neighborhood in America, the same truth quietly echoes through the cracks of peeling paint and the rattling of century-old sashes: our windows are calling out for help. And when the windows go, the rest of the house soon follows. But here’s the good news—if we save the windows, we save the community. Not just aesthetically. Not just symbolically. Literally. Historic windows are the keystones of our built heritage.

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.

When it comes to saving historic windows, most people focus on quick fixes: patching rot, slapping on paint, or swapping in replacements

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