A broken window is one of the few things in a house that goes from fine to urgent in a second. Something comes through it, a stone comes off a mower, a door slams in a gale, and suddenly there is glass on the floor and a hole in the wall. We do glass repairs on broken, smashed and cracked windows across Wishaw and Lanarkshire, and the way it works is usually in two stages: make it safe first, then fit the glass properly once it is measured.
We are a two person family run business, and we should be straight with you at the top of the page: we work Monday to Friday, eight until five. We are not a twenty four hour callout service and we would rather say so plainly than have you ringing at midnight expecting somebody. If you need someone right now, in the middle of the night, we are not that. If you need it sorted properly during the working week by people who will actually turn up, we are.
What to do in the first ten minutes
Before you ring anybody, a few things are worth doing, and they matter more than getting a quote quickly.
Get children and pets out of the room and keep them out. Broken glass travels much further than people expect, and the small pieces are the ones that end up in a foot.
Do not pick the big pieces up with bare hands. Use gloves and thick footwear, put the pieces into a rigid box or wrap them in thick newspaper rather than dropping them straight into a bin bag, and go over the floor afterwards with a vacuum rather than a brush, because a brush spreads the fine fragments about.
Leave any glass still sitting in the frame where it is if it is stable. Pulling at cracked glass that is still held in the beading is how people get cut. If it is loose and hanging, and you can reach it safely from inside, take it out with gloves on and put it somewhere out of the way.
Then photograph it. A picture of the whole window and a closer one of the damage tells us more in five seconds than five minutes on the phone, and it means we arrive with the right materials.
If the breakage was a break in rather than an accident, report it to the police before anything is cleared up, and check your insurance position before you commit to any work. Most home policies cover accidental glass breakage, and some will want their own process followed.
Stage one: making it safe
The first visit is about security and weather rather than appearance. We clear the remaining glass out of the frame properly, which matters because fragments left in the rebate will stop the new unit seating correctly later, and we board the opening so the house is secure and dry.
A boarded window is not pretty and nobody pretends otherwise, but it does the job. It keeps the weather out, it keeps the property secure, and it means you are not sitting with an open hole in the wall waiting on glass being made. For a ground floor window or a door, that security matters more than anything else.
While we are there we measure up. That is the part that determines how quickly stage two happens, because a sealed unit has to be made to the exact size of your opening.
Stage two: the glass going back in
Once the unit arrives we come back, take the board out, and glaze the opening properly. The beading comes off, the new unit goes in on fresh packers so it is carrying its weight correctly, and the beads go back. Done right, you cannot tell afterwards which window it was.
How long the wait is between the two stages depends on what the glass is. A plain clear double glazed unit in a common size is quicker than a toughened, laminated, obscure patterned or leaded one, because the specialist ones are made to order. We will give you a realistic figure when we measure rather than an optimistic one.
The frame itself almost never needs replacing because a pane has gone. The glass is a separate component sitting in the frame, and swapping it out leaves the frame, the hinges, the handle and the lock exactly where they were. If somebody has told you a broken pane means a new window, get a second opinion.
How windows actually break
Impact. The obvious one. A ball, a stone off a mower, a slammed door in the wind, a ladder. Toughened glass shatters into small blunt granules across the whole pane. Ordinary annealed glass breaks into large sharp shards. Laminated glass tends to crack and stay in place, held by the interlayer, which is exactly what it is designed to do.
Thermal stress. A crack that appears with nobody near it, usually starting at the edge and running in a curve. It happens when one part of a pane heats much faster than another, typically strong sun on one section with shade on another. It surprises people because nothing hit it, and there is a full explanation in our piece on a window that cracked on its own.
Stress from the frame. Less common, but a frame that has moved or a unit bedded badly can put point loading on the glass and crack it months later. If a window has cracked for no apparent reason and the frame looks out of square, that is worth mentioning.
Our advice article on cracked and broken window glass goes through all of it in more detail, including how to tell whether what you have is urgent or can wait a few days.
What has to go back in
You do not simply get a like for like piece of glass, because in some positions the regulations decide for you.
Any glass in a door, any glass in a side panel next to a door, and any pane whose bottom edge sits below 800mm from the floor has to be safety glass. That means toughened or laminated, never ordinary float. It is not a preference and it is not an upsell, it is building regulations, and it is there because those are the panes people walk into. The differences between the two types are set out in toughened or laminated glass.
Beyond that, the replacement should match what was there. The same thickness, so the beads sit properly. Low emissivity coating, which is standard now and keeps the heat in. The same obscure pattern if it was a bathroom. And ideally a similar tint to the panes either side of it, because a slightly different glass on a front elevation is the sort of thing you notice every day afterwards.
If privacy is the issue in the room, this is a good moment to change it, and choosing obscure glass covers the patterns.
What it costs
There is no call out fee. You pay for the work done.
Sealed unit replacements start from £75, and that figure is for a hopper sized pane, the small opener above a window. Everything beyond that is quoted on the job, because the price genuinely does depend on the pane. Size is the biggest factor, then whether it needs to be toughened or laminated, then whether it is patterned, leaded or a special. A large toughened pane in a door is a different item from a small clear one in a landing window, and putting invented ranges on a web page would only set you up for a surprise.
Send a photograph and rough measurements and we can usually give you a figure without anybody travelling. Our repair prices page sets out how we quote and what you never pay for.
Worth knowing on insurance: if you are claiming, the excess on many policies is close to the cost of a single pane, so it is worth getting our figure before you start a claim that might not be worth making.
Not just broken glass
If the glass is intact but the window has stopped working, that is a different job and it is covered on our uPVC window repair page. If the panes have gone cloudy rather than broken, the seal has failed rather than the glass, and that is misted double glazing and our glass unit replacement page. Broken glass in a door is on our door repair page, and the wider picture on both is at windows in Wishaw and doors in Wishaw.
If the glass has cracked rather than shattered, a window that cracked on its own explains thermal stress, and cracked and broken window glass covers how to judge whether it is urgent.
Where we come out to
Wishaw is home, and from there we cover Motherwell, Hamilton, Bellshill, Coatbridge, Airdrie, Newmains, Shotts, Larkhall, Blantyre, Uddingston, Carluke, Lanark, East Kilbride, Cambuslang, Rutherglen and out towards Glasgow. Every area has a page of its own on areas we cover.
Getting it sorted
Ring 01698 604 278 between eight and five, Monday to Friday, and you will get one of us rather than a call centre. Send the photographs on WhatsApp and we can tell you what we are looking at before we set off. The contact form reaches us just the same if you would rather write it down.
You can see the standard of the work on our before and after gallery, and what people made of it on our reviews page.