New Double-Hung Windows Restore Function and a Fresh Look to a Columbus Home

Built in 1888, this Columbus home is one of the city's older brick residences, the kind of place where a wall of double-hung windows was original to the house rather than a later addition. Over the following century, those same windows aged well past the point of being useful. The sashes had swollen and stuck in their frames, and storm windows had been layered on over the years just to hold back the drafts, covering up the operation the windows were originally built to have. 

The homeowner's priority was straightforward: windows that opened again, paired with a look that felt a little more current ahead of a full repaint of the house. Working with Pella Columbus, every window in the home was replaced — twenty-one in all, spanning the front room to the laundry room — with new wood windows finished in Iron Ore.

In a home built well before modern construction standards, window openings rarely match a catalog size, and this project reflected that. Each of the twenty-one replacement windows was ordered to its own specific opening rather than a single repeated size, covering rooms from the front room and living room to the bedrooms, bathrooms, a closet and the kitchen. The new windows use a traditional putty-glaze glass profile and an ogee-style sash, details that echo the look of an older wood window rather than a flat modern profile, helping the replacements read as original to the house instead of an obvious swap.

Most of the new windows use insulated dual-pane glass with a Low-E coating and an argon fill between the panes, a glazing package built to manage heat transfer far better than the single-pane glass the home was originally constructed with. For a house that had relied on storm windows for decades to make up the difference, this brings the windows themselves up to a level of efficiency the original construction never had, without changing the traditional look of the glass from the street.

The window in the main bathroom was ordered with tempered glass rather than the standard insulated glass used elsewhere in the house, a safety measure suited to a room where a window sits close to plumbing fixtures. It was also finished with a painted interior rather than the stained wood finish used throughout the rest of the home, a practical choice for a room that sees regular humidity.

Restoring basic function was the whole point of the project, and the new hardware reflects that. Each window uses a spoon-style lock finished in satin brass, along with a sash lift that makes opening the lower sash easier — a detail that matters on windows that had been painted or swollen shut for years. An integrated retractable screen rolls into view only when a window is opened and disappears when it's closed, keeping the traditional glass look intact whenever the windows are shut.

On the exterior, the homeowner chose a painted Iron Ore finish for every window in the house, a shift from whatever color the original windows carried. The decision was made with the home's next project in mind: the homeowners plan to repaint the house and wanted the new window color to set the tone for a more updated exterior, rather than matching a scheme that's about to change anyway.

The project was installed full-frame, meaning the original window frames and any storm windows were removed down to the rough opening rather than fit inside the existing frame. The home's original interior trim and casing, however, were left in place throughout the project, keeping the woodwork that gives the house its age intact even as everything behind it was replaced. What started as a house where the windows barely opened is now one where all twenty-one work the way they were meant to, with a finish that gives the homeowners a clean starting point for the repaint still to come.