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As they scraped away gunk from frame after frame with knives, Tom Franklin and David Hoggard agreed that bathroom filler has no business on a window sash.

“Don’t ever use caulk on your windows,” said Hoggard, 53, owner of Double Hung Historic Window Restoration, a Greensboro business that works to preserve and restore old buildings.

“This is an abomination,” said Franklin, who joined the company full time two years ago. “I mean, look at this. This is pitiful.”

They should know. Since Hoggard started the company a little over a decade ago, leaving a career selling musical instruments, Double Hung and its owner have earned a reputation as window experts. It started with the Kentucky native doing trial-and-error work on his own home and some vintage rental property in Greensboro, and has grown to become a substantial business with seven employees.

“My wife and I renovated several rental houses over in the Aycock neighborhood,” Hoggard said.

While replacement windows have become big business in the past three decades, Hoggard’s work with the Charles B. Aycock Historic Neighborhood Association convinced him that standards set by the U.S. Secretary of the Interior mandated repairing old windows, not replacing them.

“Somebody said, ‘But nobody knows how to do that,’” Hoggard said. “I thought, ‘I can do that.’”

He taught himself, getting help along the way from neighbors such as Franklin and working for years outdoors in his driveway. Double Hung moved into a basement workshop in downtown Greensboro four years ago, and now rehabilitates windows for structures across the South and into the Midwest. The company also makes custom wooden storm windows as an alternative to the common aluminum models.

“Probably the biggest mistake I made was I grew too fast,” Hoggard said. “We got up to 10 people, but I had to cut back.”

Double Hung does about 30 percent residential work and 70 percent commercial jobs, including Alumni House at UNCG, Market Square in High Point and Leazar Hall on the campus of N.C. State in Raleigh. For the N.C. State job, Hoggard had to call on some of his old skills as a salesman. The university planned to keep the old window frames, but replace the sash.

“I told them, ‘Let me give you a price for restoring,’” Hoggard said. “They were dead set on replacing. So I did that and came up with a price of about $750,000 to replace all the windows because of labor. Found out the dean of the School of Design wanted to get them restored, so he asked me to give them a price to restore them, which was about $250,000. He took the numbers, between $250,000 and $750,000, to find out how long it’s gonna take to get the energy payback. It’s gonna take them 75 years to get the energy savings. And people are finding that out.”

Recently Double Hung removed and restored 50 windows in the home of Rick Luebke in the historic Fisher Park neighborhood north of downtown Greensboro.

“Most of them were painted shut over the years,” Luebke said. “And now you can flip the lock and raise them with one finger.”

The majority of Double Hung’s work is in central North Carolina, split about evenly between the Triad and the Triangle. But good word of mouth has taken the company farther afield on occasion.

“I’ve done some business in Ohio,” Hoggard said. “It’s not easy to open up the Yellow Pages and find ‘historic window preservation.’ Once people find us, we get a lot of referrals.”

Some of those referrals come from preservation experts with the state government, according to Mike Cowhig, community planner for Greensboro’s Department of Housing and Community Development and executive secretary of the city’s Historic Preservation Commission.

“I’ve talked to people at the state Historic Preservation office who administer the state historic tax credit program, and they refer people across the state to David when the project involves windows,” Cowhig said.

Hoggard has given presentations to historic commissions and taught preservation work at community colleges. But more often he can be found in the Double Hung workshop, doing the meticulous work that makes old windows look new again. The work isn’t cheap — about nine hours of labor goes into each restored window.

“There’s that thing called ‘embodied energy,’\u200A” Hoggard said. “The energy it took to make this window 100 years ago, it’s been expended, it’s gone, so it has this embodied energy inside of it. To take this and throw it away — it takes a certain amount to replace it. We’re not talking about the energy efficiency — just the energy to get it to manufacturing, transport, installation, all of that.”

Adds Franklin, “It’s kind of the ultimate recycling.”

To preserve that embodied energy, Double Hung catalogs all the windows in a structure. Then Hoggard and his staff remove the windows and disassemble them, sending the wooden parts off to furniture strippers to have the paint and putty removed. They replace any damaged or missing glass, reassemble the windows, reglaze and reinstall them.

“Most of the time we weatherstrip them for energy efficiency,” Hoggard said. “Then (we) adjust them and make sure they work, and they’re good to go for 50 years.”

Contact Eddie Huffman at 373-7335 or eddie.huffman@news-record.com.