08/26/2026
I was reading Seth Godin’s “This Is Strategy” again this morning, and I came across a few passages that seemed to put words around something I have been circling for a long time. He was writing about community action, about coordination, about the steady work of chiseling away at a system until another shape begins to emerge. Not one heroic blow. Not one person arriving with the perfect answer. Persistent, consistent, organized chiseling. Find the others. Organize the others. Then do it again tomorrow.
I underlined that because, well, I recognized myself in it—or at least I recognized what I may actually be trying to become. I have never really thought of myself as a community organizer. I thought I was making windows. I thought I was restoring buildings, teaching people how to make sash, developing tools, writing books, and trying to help craftspeople become more capable. Those things all seemed connected, but I do not know that I had clearly seen the larger shape they were making.
I am beginning to see that each of those things may be a strike of the chisel. A class is a strike. A book is a strike. A restored window is a strike. A Field Lab is a strike. A Sash Factory placed into somebody else’s hands is a strike. None of those motions, by itself, changes the system. But enough people making those motions consistently, with a shared understanding of what they are trying to make, might.
And I think that is the distinction that has been coming into focus for me. The historic house community does not merely have a window problem. It has a capacity problem.
Historic house owners need people who can understand their buildings. They need people who can open up a window and recognize what is there, diagnose what has happened to it, repair the frame, manage the ropes and pulleys and weights, restore the sash, reproduce missing or badly altered parts, finish the work properly, and accept responsibility for the whole opening. That is what the building is asking for. But in most communities, the system that once produced those people has largely disappeared.
The need did not disappear with it. The houses are still there. The windows still need attention. Homeowners still need somebody to call. And into that void came the replacement-window industry with an organized answer.
I want to be fair about this, because I am not trying to turn anybody into a villain. Pella has the right to exist. Marvin has the right to exist. Andersen has the right to exist. They make products, they employ people, and they offer a legitimate solution within the kind of market they were designed to serve. Planned obsolescence is not some strange exception in our culture. It is deeply woven into the way much of our economy works, and there is a great deal of money to be made by manufacturing something, installing it, exhausting it, removing it, and selling the next thing.
The problem is that the historic house was not created within that relationship to time.
A historic house was not built with planned obsolescence at the center of its culture. It was built by people, for people, with the expectation that people would remain involved. Its parts could be understood. They could be maintained, repaired, adjusted, and, when necessary, reproduced. The house was not supposed to survive because none of its parts would ever fail. It was supposed to survive because people would continue to know what to do when they did.
I have been using the phrase innate perpetuality to describe something I see in this. I am not presenting that as some established academic theory. It is simply language I am developing for an old human impulse. People have always invested enormous labor in creating an adequate living environment. When that much work was required to build a house, it paid tremendous dividends to make the work endure. People did the best they could with what they had. They observed what worked. They collected information from what they had made, and the next iteration improved. Knowledge passed forward along with buildings, tools, and responsibility.
So when we insert a planned-obsolescence solution into a building culture founded on repairability and continuity, something more happens than the exchange of one window for another. The immediate problem may appear to be solved. The opening is filled. The rain stays out. The homeowner has a warranty and perhaps a manageable monthly payment. But the relationship among the building, the homeowner, the craftsperson, and the surrounding community has been changed.
Historic fabric leaves the building. Local knowledge is not exercised, so it weakens or disappears. Money and productive capacity leave the community and travel back toward a distant manufacturer. The homeowner receives a finished unit but acquires very little understanding of the building. And when that replacement unit reaches the end of the life imagined for it, the community is still dependent upon an outside company to sell it another one.
That is what I mean when I say that applying a planned-obsolescence solution to a house that does not have planned obsolescence at the core of its culture erodes the fabric of the historic house community. I am not talking only about the loss of old wood. I am talking about the loss of relationship, knowledge, confidence, productive ability, and responsibility. The physical fabric and the human fabric are connected.
The replacement-window companies did not necessarily create the disappearance of the artisan system. I think that distinction matters. They did, however, build a highly effective commercial system for occupying the space it left behind. When a homeowner needs an answer, that system can arrive with a recognizable brand, a salesperson, a measuring procedure, financing, production schedules, installation crews, advertising, and warranties. It knows how to convert a problem into a transaction and how to deliver the transaction at scale.
On the other side, somebody may tell the homeowner, ‘You really ought to save those windows.’ And that may be true. But if nobody can show up and diagnose the opening, repair the frame, manage the mechanics, restore or reproduce the sash, finish the work, and take responsibility for the whole window, then preservation is not yet a usable alternative. It is a preference. Maybe it is even a deeply held value. But it is not an answer the homeowner can actually purchase and put to work.
That is not a fair contest. One side is an organized delivery system. The other side is often a wish.
This is the void Window Craft is intended to fill.
Window Craft is not merely an argument against replacement windows, and it is not another branded window competing for the same sale. It brings joinery, carpentry, and finishing together into a complete operating system. Joinery gives us the ability to create and reproduce the parts. Carpentry gives us the ability to understand and manipulate the frame and mechanics in the wall. Finishing protects the work and carries it forward. With all three available, a person can take responsibility for the whole window instead of installing whatever can be bought.
The ultimate product of that system is not a restored window. The ultimate product is local capacity.
That means the real competition is not one window against another window. It is system against system. One system manufactures the solution somewhere else and sells it into the community. The other develops people within and for the community. One concentrates production and depends upon recurring consumption. The other distributes knowledge and makes continuing stewardship possible. One treats the window primarily as a product category. The other treats it as one part of a living building culture.
I want to give the replacement-window companies the competition they deserve. I do not mean that I want to imitate them. If we merely manufacture our own branded unit and send it around the country, we will have accepted their definition of the problem. I want historic house communities to recover the ability to choose something other than dependence—to have people who possess the tools, knowledge, and organized support to perpetuate what is already there.
This is also why corporate sponsorship is not a neutral question for Window Craft. Sponsorship is not just free money. It gives the sponsor legitimacy, visibility, access, and some degree of influence over the boundaries of the conversation. Even when nobody states the conditions out loud, it becomes difficult to tell the whole truth about a system when that system is paying for the microphone.
I have watched historic-house initiatives say that they want homeowners to retain their original windows while giving the leading sponsorship position at a historic-homeowner fair to Pella. I understand how that happens. Events cost money. Organizations need sponsors. Pella is willing to write the check. But the contradiction remains. The initiative says it is trying to preserve historic fabric while granting its strongest institutional platform to a company whose commercial interest is served when original windows are removed and manufactured units take their place.
That does not mean Pella should be silenced. It does not mean the company should be forbidden to compete. It means Window Craft has to remain free to tell the truth about replacement and to build the alternative without wondering whether the truth will offend the sponsor. We can recognize the right of replacement-window companies to exist without giving them influence over a movement created to restore the alternative their business model displaced.
If we take money that requires us to soften the reason we exist, we have not gained capacity. We have traded away independence. Worse, we may become one more preservation initiative that speaks the language of stewardship while quietly channeling people back toward replacement because replacement remains the only system in the room with enough money and organization to act.
A friend of mine recently accepted a job with one of the large replacement-window manufacturers. He had been a very good advocate for the kind of work I am describing. But he needed a job. He needed the income, and the company was able to give him a defined place inside an organized economic system. Now, naturally enough, his work is connected to promoting the agenda of the company that employs him.
I do not see that as betrayal. In fact, I think it reveals the problem more clearly than almost anything else could. The replacement industry currently possesses the economic machinery to find capable people, pay them, organize their work, and give them a role. Window Craft may inspire people. It may give them a sense of meaning and possibility. But until it can also create viable ways for them to make a living, talented people will continue to be absorbed by the better-funded system.
A cause cannot depend forever upon sacrifice, goodwill, or volunteer enthusiasm. At some point, the people doing the work have to eat. Their families have to be supported. Their tools, shops, trucks, insurance, and time have to be paid for. If commitment to the cause and the ability to earn a living remain opposing choices, the movement will continue losing good people—not because they do not believe in it, but because belief is not yet an economy.
So Window Craft must become more than a philosophy and more than a curriculum. It has to create a genuine counter-economy. Artisans must be able to earn a living practicing it. They must be able to establish shops and Outposts, manufacture appropriate parts, manage projects, teach other people, train successors, and circulate both knowledge and productive capacity through their own communities. The work has to produce more workmen. The project has to leave behind more than a finished project.
This brings me back to Godin’s chiseling. Persistence alone is not the strategy. A person can strike a chisel all day and ruin a perfectly good piece of wood. The strikes must be coordinated around a shared picture of what is being made. They must continue after the first excitement wears off and after the existing system begins pushing back. The status quo usually wins by possessing the longer attention span. It waits for the insurgents to become tired, distracted, broke, or interested in something else.
The answer is organized, persistent, connected chiseling. A hundred people doing it. Maybe someday a thousand. A class is one strike, but an alumnus who teaches another person is a more leveraged strike. A Sash Factory doing productive work in another town is another. A book that gives people common language when I am not in the room is another. An Outpost that continues producing capable people after I leave is not merely another project. It is the beginning of systemic change.
That has also changed the way I see the books I am trying to write. They are not peripheral products sitting alongside the real work, and they are not merely another possible stream of income. Writing codifies thought. It lets people who are not together remain in some kind of coordination. I cannot stand in every shop, attend every project, or repeat every conversation. A body of writing can preserve the ideas, the methods, the distinctions, and the reasons behind the work.
The right books, in the right order, can become a path. They can help an interested observer understand what is missing. They can help that observer become a practitioner. They can help a practitioner become a leader. And they can help a leader begin organizing capacity in another community. The books can carry the culture of Window Craft across distance and time, provided I do the work of making the language clear enough for other people to take hold of it.
That, I think, is what I have been trying to say with unite, equip, and send. Those words are not simply a slogan I thought sounded good. They describe the actual machinery.
We unite people around a common understanding of the problem and the possibility. We help them see that the absence of capable artisans is not inevitable, and that replacement is not the only conceivable answer. We equip them with knowledge, tools, disciplines, systems, and experience inside real work. Then we send them—not merely home with a certificate or a pleasant memory, but back into historic house communities capable of beginning something there.
WindowFest in Uvalde can become a visible demonstration of that entire cycle. It is not simply an event where a group of people will repair some windows. The introductory Field Labs, WindowFest itself, WindowLympics, the advanced work at the Opera House, the teaching, the meals, the fellowship, the tools, and the writing all belong to one story. People are called together. They work and learn within a common culture. They see joinery, carpentry, and finishing brought together. They discover where they fit. Then they go outward with a clearer picture of what might be built where they live.
The Uvalde Outpost matters because it can show that the work does not have to disappear when the event ends. An Outpost is a place where knowledge, tools, productive work, teaching, and leadership remain connected. It is a local system capable of producing the change we say we want. If it works, the repaired windows at the Opera House will be important, but they will not be the largest result. The larger result will be people who can imagine and begin reproducing capacity elsewhere.
I need to be honest that I am still in transition myself. I still earn much of my living by going out and doing projects. I may read Seth Godin in the morning and see the outlines of a system, and then I still have to put my tools in the truck and go make the day’s work pay. I need the income. The larger structure is not yet carrying all of its own weight. I need help, and I am still learning how to recruit that help without reducing people either to unpaid believers or hired hands who have no ownership in the cause.
So I am not writing this from the far side of a completed transition. I have not nailed it all down. I am trying to move from being the person who personally supplies the answer toward becoming somebody who organizes the conditions under which many people can carry the answer forward together. Some days I can see that very clearly. Other days I am simply trying to finish the windows in front of me and keep everything moving.
But perhaps that is what the chiseling looks like. The larger work does not arrive all at once. It emerges from persistent motion guided by an increasingly clear picture. The projects are not a distraction from the movement if they become places where methods are tested, people are equipped, lessons are captured, and capacity is left behind. The question is whether each strike merely completes another piece of work or contributes to a system that can continue working without everything depending upon me.
I am not asking the established preservation system or the replacement-window industry for permission to do this. I am also not searching for a villain. I am naming a void. The historic house community needs more than appreciation for old buildings. It needs an organized artisan answer. It needs people who know what to do.
Replacement-window companies became the default because they built an organized system and the artisan alternative largely ceased to exist. Window Craft intends to build that alternative again—not as a nostalgic reenactment of the past, but as a living, teachable, economically viable system for the present.
We are not trying to prevent replacement-window companies from existing. We are making certain they are no longer the only organized answer in the room. We intend to give them the competition they deserve.
Our answer is not another disposable product. Our answer is people—with the knowledge, tools, and capacity to perpetuate what is worth keeping.
