The Sashie Files, Part 1: What Is a Sashie?

sash·ie (noun, Australian trade slang), /ˈsæʃ.i/

Not to be confused with: a sashimi chef (different knife skills entirely), a fashion accessory, someone who simply "likes old houses," or a general carpenter or builder without the specific technical skill for sash windows. A sashie has often had their arm stuck up inside a box frame at 7am, fishing for a snapped cord, wondering about their life choices.

Why We're Starting Here

Over the next few months, we're kicking off a series called The Sashie Files: a collection of stories and opinions from Matt, the bloke who started Lock and Latch back in 2016, and who's actually been restoring sash windows since around 2003. That's over 20 years of experience. Like most genuine sashies, Matt started out with a fully qualified carpentry background before specialising. His career began in the UK, where sash windows are common enough, and old enough, that you see what stands the test of time, and, just as importantly, you see what doesn't, until the pattern becomes impossible to miss. Twenty years on, Matt's more or less seen it all: every seal that failed early, every "quick fix" that caused a bigger problem five years later, every timber repair that held up and every one that didn't.

Over those years, Matt's worked on pretty much everything a sash window can be. One window jobs on neighbours' houses in the Northern Beaches of Sydney. Full strata blocks across Sydney with dozens of windows on the go at once. Heritage listed homes, schools, and government buildings. Old workers cottages in the Inner West of Sydney.

Matt, with his crew earlier in his career, long before Lock and Latch existed. This photo doesn't have a filter on it, it really is that old!

Matt's always kept the business deliberately small, because he'd rather personally oversee every job than grow past the point where he can still put eyes on the work himself. It's a bit old fashioned as a business philosophy, but it's also exactly why the standard stays high.

Matt's first ever Sashie van. Sashies don't mess about with their words: it does exactly what it says on the van.

This series isn't going to be a polished how to guide. It's going to be an anecdotal journey about the problems he sees day in and day out, the best way to overcome them, and the things nobody tells you about sash windows until you've pulled apart your three hundredth one. (Somewhere down the track, we'll also get into the story of the time Matt put a saw through his arm, but that one deserves its own post.)

So What Does a Sashie Actually Do?

In practice, being a sashie means:

• Knowing, often within a first glance at a sash window, whether it's a repair job or a straight replacement: sashies can usually tell immediately
• Knowing which products are the right ones for the job, and which ones will fail: not in theory, but because he's watched both play out over enough jobs to know the difference
• Having strong, occasionally unreasonable opinions about sash cord, pulleys, and whichever seal a customer swears by because they saw it on Facebook

It's a niche trade with techniques passed down for centuries, handed from generation to generation of sashies.

Speaking of which, a real sashie's eyes light up at a diagram like this one:

Most people's eyes would glaze over. A sashie sees an old friend and laminates it!

Why Sashies Have Such Strong Opinions

If you spend any time around a genuine sashie, you'll notice they tend to have firm opinions about the "right" way to do things. It's because a good chunk of a sashie's work is going back in and fixing what someone else got wrong.

A compression seal fitted where the window really needed a brush seal. Weights added without properly rebalancing the sash. Windows painted shut, sometimes for so many coats and so many years that nobody in the house even remembers they used to open. Draught seal beading fitted facing the wrong way. Every one of these is a job that could have been done right the first time, by someone who actually knew sash windows. And don't get Matt started on mitre corners, or the lack of them, where they should be!

A genuine sashie has usually been called back to remediate enough of these jobs to have earned their opinions the hard way.

Don't Ask a Sashie This

Some questions are perfectly reasonable. Some will get you a polite answer followed by a very long pause. A few examples:

"Do you do doors and casement windows too?" Technically, yes, most sashies can easily fix these too. But it's not their speciality. Double hung timber sash windows are the actual craft. Everything else is just moonlighting.

"I love aluminium windows, should I replace my sash windows with these?" This one tends to get a diplomatic explanation of why the timber sash window you already have is worth keeping, and why aluminium has never quite managed to replicate it. Sashies love timber windows.

"Please can you paint my window shut?" No, and this one may make a sashie wince a little. Draught proofing means fitting a proper seal so the window still opens and closes smoothly. Painting a window shut is usually the exact problem a sashie gets called out to undo, not the solution.

Why This Matters to You, Not Just to Us

We're not writing this series to sell you something in every paragraph. We're writing it because after twenty years, Matt's picked up a genuine point of view about which products earn their keep and which ones are marketing dressed as innovation, about what actually keeps a hundred year old window working for another hundred years.

That kind of thing can't really be summarised in a product description. It comes out better as stories, and we decided it was time to record all this knowledge.

So, welcome to the series. See you next time when we will be covering one of the most common questions we get from our customers, can you guess what it is?!