The Windows School
Miles Brewton House
At the Miles Brewton House, we designed a semi-mass production window repair system to maximize efficiency and economy on the repair of forty-plus sash windows. This included a fully-stocked workshop with various work stations for individual repairs and a training program whereby workers would learn basic skills for window repair, while gaining skills that would be pertinent on the repair of other elements throughout the house.
Filling a Local Need
In the late 1980s, I was asked to join a team of paint analysts, historians, and conservation scientists headed up by architects Phillips and Opperman to do a thorough study of the Miles Brewton House. The study would result in a historic structures file and conservation assessment, and we would oversee a contractor working on every part of the house from the roof to the basement, including stone, columns, porticos, windows, and slate roofs. Several months into the study, in the spring of 1988, we evaluated the contractors in town and concluded that there were none sufficiently trained to perform this type of work. We recommended to owner Peter Manigault that we set up a company and train workers from scratch, as this was only way for the house to receive proper treatment. We suggested to Peter that we work with Tommy Graham, the very skilled and able construction foreman who oversaw projects on Peter's plantation, to hire a crew and train them one by one. In early summer, while the study was still going on of the building, we began putting this crew together. While many areas of the Miles Brewton House were not yet ready to be worked on, there were forty-some windows in need of repair. We decided to put together a shop and hire and train a few people to repair the windows.
Peter's support of the window repair school at the Miles Brewton House enabled a great gift to the community, because through this project we trained a dozen craftsmen who, before the project was done, were already setting up shops and working on other projects in town using the skills they had learned while working at Miles Brewton.
Scaling Up to Address Multiple Windows at Once
At this point, I had been restoring windows for nearly fifteen years and had developed many techniques. This is the first project where we actually tried to set up semi-mass production and train relatively unskilled workers. We had concluded that people willing, interested, and with good attitudes would usually be easier to train than people who already thought they knew how to do the work. We decided to set up a shop in the basement of the Miles Brewton House where we could train the workers, a practical operation because by starting the workers in the shop, we could train them on all kinds of basic skills they could use throughout the building. Some of them would go into paint removal from decorative elements while others would go into repair of damaged elements.
We repaired the first few windows ourselves so that Linda, the foreman, and Tom, the general contractor, understood the process. I worked with Tommy and Linda each day on every aspect of window repair: removing paint, removing glass, consolidating damaged areas, making new pieces of molding. Gradually we laid out the shop, built the accessories and work tables, and assembled the necessary tools and supplies.
Tools and Training
I realized that we were accomplishing several very important things. By beginning the project with the window repair school, we were sensitizing the repair workers to the goals of the project, because how you treat a window sash is how you would treat any other part of the building. We were teaching them to protect, not replace, the original fabric. We emphasized restraint and patience, because the quality of the work, not quantity, was most important. We began by teaching the workers how to use basic tools, such as chisels, files, scrapers, sanders, and heat guns, as well as tool sharpening, tool care, and worker safety.
A month or two into the project, we realized that although you could work alongside people and teach them, without supervision the partially-trained people would inevitably forget and leave out several steps in a process. To solve this problem and encourage worker independence and accuracy, we produced a set of printed specifications with drawings and numbers and posted them on the wall, after which we had many fewer problems. This became the basis for our current window specifications.
Maximizing Efficiency and Economy
Because an average sash is comprised of the many elements, including muntins, stiles and rails, the jamb itself with the stop beads, parting beads, the sill, exterior brick molds, and interior molding, a thorough top-to-bottom treatment for a window sash can be estimated at 100 man hours.
Over the years, I began to realize that the key to working efficiently is breaking down work into segments, batching similar types of repairs to repair multiple windows at once. At the Miles Brewton House, we put these principles into action by dedicating specific work stations with all of the tools and supplies for individual operations, from replacing the glass ledge on a muntin to consolidating the rotted ends of vertical members. Instead of making individual repairs to each window, we repaired all of the brick mold and stop beads with rotten ends, for example, for several windows at once. With the proper setup, it doesn't take much more time to treat those pieces for several windows than it does for one window. This approach makes for a much more efficient and economical project.
Basic Shop Setup
The shop had two central tables and work benches along the walls. Every table had a large surface to work on and storage built underneath. When sash arrived at the shop, they would first go to a work table where they would stand up or lay out flat, where both paint removal and the unpleasant task of heating the putty and carefully taking the glass out took place. The glass was numbered for each sash and stored in a numbered storage area on the wall. In this way, we kept the lead and dust paint table away from the rest of the room.
Another long workbench against the wall was home to priming and painting operations. Both underneath the bench and along the wall were places to hang sash as their paint dried.
We placed a table saw and band saw around the shop's perimeter and in the corners. We stationed routers and hand tools within reach to every operation. Each bench had a definite purpose, whether it was removing paint and glass, repairing with dutchmen, or mixing epoxies, and we always treated multiple pieces at once.
Technique and Technology Transfer
As the conservator, I had spent over a decade developing practical conservation repair treatments for all kinds of windows, based on the underlying philosophical desire to save all original material and not compromise the integrity of historic fabric. At the Miles Brewton House, I trained craftsmen who would go on to apply these skills and principles to other projects.
While working on budgets and analyzing progress a year into the project, we began to realize what we had accomplished, and saved, with the transfer of this technology. At the beginning of the project, when every two weeks I flew down to Charleston for two weeks, and my travel and hourly rate had to be figured into the cost, the first couple of windows (including sash, sills, and molding) cost $5,000-$7,000 range per window, about the same as today's going rate for sash restoration.
The next half dozen windows, which were done with some of my supervision, some of Tom's, and daily supervision by Linda, but with the bulk of the work carried out by people we had trained, cost in the $3,500 range. By the time they had repaired twenty to thirty windows, the cost had come down to under a thousand dollars per window. This was possible because all of these techniques and principles had been passed to people who were working efficiently for $10-12 an hour.