Window Replacement in Farmingdale, ME

Vinyl window replacement earns its place on the Farmingdale houses built in the decades around the town's 1973 median, where openings are plain and owners would rather stop painting sash. Of the three frame materials we install, vinyl carries the smallest price.

Vinyl in place of wood is a swap the town's exemption does not settle in writing, because it speaks of like materials. We ask the code officer how new vinyl units are treated before the first old window comes out.

Wood window replacement suits the 23.9 percent of Farmingdale housing built in 1939 or earlier, houses whose wood sash is part of how they read from the road. The Peter Grant House on Grant Street, built in 1830 with a temple front over the Kennebec, is one of the oldest surviving Greek Revival houses in Maine, and it has sash windows.

A wood-clad window, finished wood indoors with a weather skin of aluminum, vinyl or fiberglass outdoors, made to a six-over-six layout keeps that look on a house of the same age. We found no local historic review in Farmingdale's code, and the National Park Service says being on the National Register places no restriction on a private owner who uses no federal funds.

Entry door replacement falls under the same Farmingdale exemption as windows: a door of the same dimensions in like material needs no building permit. Fitting a new slab to the old frame keeps those dimensions, and so does a prehung door, the slab already hinged in a new frame with its own sill, set into the same rough opening.

The threshold decides between the two: a sill that goes soft under an awl means the whole frame comes out, and that rot is written up with a price of its own before work goes further. If the old door is wood and the new one fiberglass, the like-material question comes up again, and we take it to the code officer.