Our Bay Window & Restoration project won an award from a local historical society! The neighborhoods that make up University City are Philadelphia’s oldest suburbs. Rural until the 1860’s, the “Street Car Suburb” expanded west from Center City with the introduction of electric trolley cars in the 1890s and soon became home to the city’s rich, who built elegant mansions across the Schuylkill River.  Many of the homes in Powelton Village, Cedar Park, and Woodland Terrace have maintained their hundred-year-old charms:  slate roofs, copper flashing, scalloped shingles, and gingerbread porches.

We’ve received a lot of calls this fall for weatherization work from clients eager to upgrade their windows, heating systems, or insulation. A recent University City client had a particularly drafty bay window attached to her ever-cold living room. Not only was the bay uninsulated, but it was severely water damaged on the exterior. 

An avid gardener, our client’s beloved roof-top oasis had finally given way to old age. Our client had enjoyed a view of the Center City skyline from the roof deck outside her sun-filled third floor loft for a decade, but now she needed a complete solution, and quickly. The existing wooden frames of her glass panels were sun damaged, rotted, and leaked a little more with each new rainstorm. She had tried numerous times, working with a handyman and then a roofer but as the leaks persisted she turned to us for a wholistic approach. The biggest problem was that the windows were glass holes..