Window screens, screen doors and window repair in Los Angeles

Wood double-hungs in pre-war houses

Bungalows and Spanish houses from the 1900s through the 1930s, so Highland Park, Boyle Heights, West Adams and much of Silver Lake, run on fir sash hung on cord over a pulley, with a cast-iron weight in a pocket inside the jamb. The cord snaps on the lower sash first, since that’s the one that gets worked and the cord saws over the pulley every time it moves. Uppers often still have sound cord on them under forty years of paint. Re-roping a lower sash means pulling the interior stop bead and nothing else. The parting bead only comes out when the upper has to drop too, and plenty of LA jambs were built with no access pocket cover at all, so one gets cut in and patched back.

Paint is the other one. Painted shut is rarely one bad paint job. It’s four or five layers bridging the sash to the beads, with an interior coat done while the window was shut. Freeing it means scoring both faces and breaking the exterior seal from outside, which on a second story means a ladder. Old linseed putty goes chalky and drops out, and water then sits in the bottom rail until it rots.

Steel casements in 1920s and 30s houses

Hot-rolled steel sash shows up all over the Spanish, Deco and Streamline stock, so Los Feliz, Windsor Square, Hancock Park, Miracle Mile and a lot of the Westside. The sash is steel hung in a steel frame, glazed in putty against a rabbet instead of a wood stop, and it swings on a friction stay or a worm-drive crank. These don’t wear out. They rust. Rust takes up more room than the steel it came from, so the section swells and the sash grows until it binds in its own frame, usually along the hinge stile first. A window that needs a shoulder to close is telling you that.

Adjustment does nothing here. The fix is wire wheel down to bright metal, rust converter and paint, fresh putty in the rabbet, and a stay or crank rebuilt or replaced with a matching one. Steel casement almost never gets swapped for a stock unit in an HPOZ, and matching units are hard to find and expensive everywhere else, so these get repaired in place. Say if you have them. It changes the price more than anything else on this page.

Aluminum sliders in 1970s and 80s stock

Mill-finish horizontal sliders fill the apartment stock in Palms, North Hollywood, Van Nuys and Long Beach. People blame the rollers, and the rollers are a symptom. Wind-driven dust and stucco sand pack the sill track until the roller skids instead of rolling, and the soft aluminum wears a groove. New rollers in a track already worn through feel better for a month. A galled track needs a repair cap first. The latch is pot metal and 40 years brittle, so it snaps when somebody forces a sticking sash.

Fiberglass mesh on a west exposure in the Valley goes chalky in five to eight years, then tears at the spline the first time a dog leans on it. Aluminum holds up longer and holds its shape, though it dents and it chalks white near the coast. Where a dog is the problem the answer is vinyl-coated polyester, the heavy pet mesh, at about seven times the strand thickness. Solar mesh, the 65 to 90 percent shade cloth, is a common Valley retrofit and takes real heat off an afternoon room.

Santa Anas take screens off the house. An unlatched screen gets pushed out and lands in the planter, and the corner keys loosen on impact. The frame goes out of square and won’t sit back in the opening, with nothing torn. Sprinkler overspray does the slower damage, since the water here is hard enough to scale a pane and eventually etch it.

Sliding screen doors

Most LA patio assemblies use a bottom-rolling screen door on adjustable rollers. Rollers flat-spot. The sill track gets dented flat where people step on it. Mesh is what holds these doors square, so once it stretches the frame racks. A bowed bottom rail costs more to rebuild than a new made-to-order door, and you should hear that early.

Hillside lots in Echo Park, Mount Washington and the Hollywood Hills sit on cripple walls over slope, and slope creeps. The opening racks and the sash stays a rectangle. Northridge left racked openings across the Valley that got patched cosmetically and never resquared.

The signature is a window that binds in one part of its travel and runs fine through the rest. Anyone quoting should measure both diagonals of the opening. More than about a quarter inch between them and this is framing trouble showing up at the window. Force a new sash in and you break that one too.

Homeowners get talked into things on windows that quietly fail an inspection later. The bedroom window and the pane next to the slider are where it usually goes wrong.

A bedroom window is an egress window

Every sleeping room needs an operable escape opening: 5.7 square feet of net clear openable area, 5.0 at grade floor, at least 24 inches of clear height, 20 inches of clear width, and a sill no higher than 44 inches. Hitting both minimums doesn’t get you to 5.7 square feet. That’s the standard for a new opening. Swap a bedroom window like for like and the replacement rule applies instead: largest standard size the maker offers, same operating style, opening no smaller than what’s there, no enlarging the framed opening. Enlarge the opening or change the operating style and you’re back to the full 5.7. Anything fitted to that window has to open from inside without a key or a tool, so a bar or a limiter goes on only after somebody checks.

Glass beside a patio door

Glazing in a door, and in a panel beside one where the edge falls inside a 24 inch arc of the door and the bottom sits under 60 inches, is a hazardous location and has to be safety glazing. In 1970s apartment stock that pane beside the slider often isn’t tempered. Whatever replaces it has to be, and glass is its own licensed trade.

Blind cords

New blinds sold now follow the window covering standard, ANSI/WCMA A100.1-2022, whose current revision took effect in June 2024 and pushed both stock and made-to-order products toward cordless or inaccessible cords. It is an industry standard for what gets sold, not a building code. But it means a corded blind from twenty years ago usually can’t be matched with the same thing off the shelf, so expect a cordless replacement.

In a rental, Civil Code 1941.3 says the window locks that are already there have to work. It doesn’t make a landlord add a lock to a window that never had one. Louvered and casement windows are excluded, and so is anything more than 12 feet up or 6 feet across from the ground, a roof or a platform.

Scraping or planing a painted sash in a pre-1978 house disturbs lead paint, and that’s a large share of the older stock here. The small-job carve-out in the federal RRP rule, under 6 square feet inside or 20 outside, doesn’t cover window replacement at all. Replace one in a pre-1978 home and the full rule applies however small it looks.

Glazing putty and window caulk in pre-1980 buildings are asbestos suspects. Hard and intact it does nothing. Chisel it out of a sash rabbet and it is friable, so nobody should chase old putty without a test. Tell us the year built. It changes how the work area gets set up, and it belongs in the price.

California has a narrow exemption that lets some minor work be done without a CSLB contractor license. It’s Business and Professions Code section 7048, and all of it has to hold, not only the money. The work has to be casual, minor or inconsequential. Labor, materials and everything else added together have to come to less than $1,000. No building permit can be required. And the job can’t be one piece of a larger project, or a bigger job split into smaller contracts to stay under the number. The exemption also drops away for anyone who brings in another person to do the work or help with it, or who advertises in a way that might suggest to the public they’re a contractor.

Screens and screen doors, rollers and tracks, sash locks and casement cranks, weatherstripping, freeing a painted sash, sash cord and balance work, blinds and shades. Those usually sit under the line on price, and price is only one of the conditions. Replacing a whole window unit is a different animal. In the City of LA it needs a building permit, and that fails a condition before you get near the money. A permitted replacement also has to hit Title 24, which for a prescriptive job in the climate zones LA sits in means a U-factor of 0.30 or better and an SHGC of 0.23 or better, and the NFRC sticker stays on the glass until the inspector reads it. Buy on price without checking that number and the window goes in twice. Unincorporated LA County and the other 87 cities each run their own counter. Glass in a hazardous location, a racked opening and pre-1978 window replacement go to a licensed contractor.

Year built first. Then how many openings, and what each one is: wood double-hung, steel casement, aluminum slider, awning, crank casement, vinyl retrofit. Say what each is doing in plain words. Won’t open, falls shut, won’t lock, rattles, screen torn, door off the track. For screens we need the outside dimensions of the frame, the frame thickness and a photo of a corner. For a slider roller, a photo of the roller and any maker stamp. For steel casement, say whether the sash still closes without a shove and where the rust is. Say if it is a bedroom window and how you would reach it.

Tell us as well if you are renting, or if the house sits in an HPOZ like Highland Park or Angelino Heights, since street-facing work in a preservation zone goes through Planning and vinyl rarely gets approved. Photos help more than anything. Shoot the whole window from inside, then get in close on the corner of the sash or the screen frame. Send it as one list and you get a firm price before the visit is scheduled.