Why Orillia's old houses are a different window-cleaning job

The weekend the Mariposa Folk Festival rolls into Tudhope Park, half of Orillia seems to be down by the water and the other half is hiding from the crowds. It is a good week to walk the old streets in the North Ward, the ones up behind Couchiching Beach Park and off Mississaga Street, where the maples are older than most of the country and the houses have been there since Leacock was writing about the place.

Those houses are beautiful. They are also the reason window cleaning in Orillia is not one job, it is two. A new build out in West Ridge and a 1910 home off Peter Street need completely different things from us, and the old ones are where most of the work hides.

An old town means old windows

Orillia has more genuinely old housing stock than most towns its size. Walk the North Ward or the blocks around the Opera House and you are looking at homes that have had the same window openings for a hundred years, even if the glass has been swapped a few times.

That history shows up in the glass. You get tall narrow sashes, transom windows over the front door, the odd piece of old wavy glass that ripples the view a little, and frames that were built by someone who expected them to last. None of it is hard to clean well. It just takes a different approach than running a pole up a flat wall of new vinyl windows, and a crew that rushes it will leave streaks in every corner those old muntins create.

Storm windows are the part people forget

The big one on older Orillia homes is storm windows.

A lot of these houses still run a second pane on the outside through the winter, either the old wood-framed storms that come off in spring or the aluminum triple-track kind that slide. Either way you now have two sheets of glass with a gap between them, and that gap is where the haze lives. Dust works its way in, a little moisture fogs it up, and you end up looking through two dirty surfaces instead of one.

Cleaning these properly means getting at all four faces, not just the two you can reach from outside. If the storms have not come off in a few years, that inner surface is usually the worst of the lot. We pull them, clean both panes and the prime window behind, and put it all back square. It is fiddly work and it is exactly the kind of thing that gets skipped on a quick job.

Divided lights and sashes painted shut

The other thing about old houses is the panes themselves.

True divided-light windows, the ones with real wood bars splitting the glass into six or eight or twelve small panes, are gorgeous and they are slow. Every one of those little panes has four corners, and four corners is where streaks hide. There is no shortcut. It is a small squeegee, a steady hand, and a cloth for the edges, pane by pane. You cannot pole it and you cannot rush it.

And then there is the paint. On a house that has been repainted a dozen times over the decades, sashes get painted shut. A window that will not open is a window you cannot clean from both sides the easy way, and the screens behind them have often not come out since the Carter years. We work around what opens and what does not, clean what we can reach, and tell you straight if a sash is stuck so you know before you are standing there wondering why the inside still looks off.

The lakefront side is the opposite problem

Not every Orillia home is a century house, of course. Out on Lake Couchiching, around Atherley and the Narrows and up the Lakeshore, the homes are newer and the windows are bigger, and there the enemy is not age, it is lake spray and the hard-water film it leaves on the glass facing the water.

That is a different write-up and a different process, and we cover the pricing and the area breakdown on our main window cleaning in Orillia page. If your place is one of the lakefront builds, that is the one to read.

How we handle the older homes

The short version: slower, by hand, and gentle on the old glazing.

We do not blast old wood-framed windows with high pressure, because the glazing putty that holds century glass in place does not love it. The pure-water pole still does the high exterior panes on the newer parts of the house, but the heritage glass, the divided lights, the storms, the transoms, those get done the old way, by a person with a blade and a cloth. Screens come out where they will come out, get a rinse, and go back in. Anything painted shut, we flag.

It takes longer than a new build and we price it honestly for the time. What you get back is the whole window working for you again, both panes of the storms clear, every little divided pane clean to the corner, instead of the half-job you get when someone treats a 1910 house like a 2020 one.

When to just call

If you have storm windows that fogged up over the winter, divided panes you have given up trying to do yourself, or screens that have not seen daylight in a decade, that is our kind of job. Book online in about 60 seconds or grab a free quote first and we will text you a real number the same day. Local crew out of Horseshoe Valley, about twenty minutes from downtown, no rural travel surcharge, fully insured.

If you are over on the water instead of in the old part of town, the lakefront version of this story plays out down in Innisfil too, where the hard water off Lake Simcoe does its own number on the glass.