Window cleaning in Mar Vista, where some glass cannot be replaced.

Yes, and we approach them differently than we approach a newer house, because the glazing in those homes is effectively not replaceable. The tract went up in 1948 as a set of post-and-beam houses by Gregory Ain with landscaping laid out by Garrett Eckbo, and the blocks around Beethoven Street, Meier Street, Marco Place, and Palms Boulevard sit inside a historic preservation overlay, so what faces the street is reviewed rather than swapped out at will. Three things follow from that on a work day. First, much of the original glazing is drawn sheet glass rather than modern float, so it carries a faint waviness you can pick out in raking light, it is thinner and softer than what a supplier would hand you now, and it is annealed - there is no safety layer in it, so nobody on our crew leans a weight into a fixed panel or presses a pole against one. Second, the putty and wood stops holding that glass are around seventy-five years old and have gone chalky and shrunken in places, so we work with controlled water instead of volume: flooding a bead like that washes it out, and the repair is a glazier, not a wipe. Third, we change nothing. No coating that alters how a panel reads from the sidewalk without asking first, no hardware pulled, no anchors set into a beam, no adhesive left on a frame. If we notice a bead failing or a panel that has started to slip in its stop, you get a photo and a plain description so you can take it to the right trade before it becomes a broken pane.

The quote is built from what is actually on the house - pane count, glass area, how many floors, and how each elevation is reached - rather than from a neighborhood average, and Mar Vista makes that unusually worth doing carefully. A modest post-war footprint here can hold a lot more glass than its square footage suggests once you count a clerestory band, a wall of sliders, and the fixed panels beside them. Many houses on these blocks have also been added onto, so one address can carry two generations of window at once: newer dual-pane units upstairs alongside original single-pane glazing at ground level. Those are two different jobs on the same visit, and pretending otherwise is how people get surprised. Access is the other honest variable, because the tract houses sit close together on narrow lots and some elevations are reached on foot through a side yard rather than from a driveway. Post-construction cleanup after a remodel or an addition is quoted as its own scope, not folded in at a maintenance rate, since removing stucco haze, mud, and overspray is slower work than cleaning a maintained window. Our minimum service is $250, you get the exact figure in writing before anyone starts, and our instant quote calculator will give you a number right now.

Yes, and it is worth booking as a real scope rather than as a regular cleaning, because construction residue behaves nothing like household soil and the order of operations decides whether your new glass survives it. Stucco, mortar, and cement dust are alkaline. Left on a pane through a few damp mornings they will begin to etch it, and that mark is in the glass permanently - no product recovers it. So the sequence matters: we flood the grit off first and never dry-wipe an abrasive film across a panel, because dragging that dust with a cloth or a squeegee is how a window ends up covered in fine arcing scratches. Then we take the rest in order - mud and joint compound, paint and primer overspray, tape adhesive, shipping labels and their glue - each with the method that suits it instead of one aggressive pass over everything. The part most people are never told: new tempered glass can leave the factory with fabricating debris fused into its surface, tiny particles from the tempering oven, and a blade run across one of those will plow a permanent scratch. So we test an inconspicuous corner before any scraping, we keep the blade off panels that fail that test, and we tell you which ones those were. And if a sealed unit has already lost its seal and fogged between the panes, we will say so plainly - that haze is inside the glass, no cleaning reaches it, and the fix is a replacement unit.

Yes, and we schedule around how this district actually runs rather than dropping in whenever a route has a gap. The Sunday morning market on Grand View Boulevard brings tents, produce, prepared food, and a dense crowd right up against the neighboring frontages, so glass that was spotless on Saturday reads badly by Sunday afternoon. For those tenants a Monday-morning slot puts a clean window in front of a new week, while an owner who wants to look their best for the market crowd is better served late Saturday - either works, but the two are not interchangeable, and we ask rather than assume. Much of the commercial building stock along these blocks is older single-story frontage with original steel or aluminum storefront framing, which we clean without letting solution stand in the mitered corners where it will encourage corrosion. Roll-up security gates are the detail that gets missed here: their tracks and slats shed metal grit and old lubricant every morning they are raised, and it lands on the lowest eighteen inches of glass, so that band needs the grit rinsed off before anything touches it rather than smeared upward. We run weekly, biweekly, or monthly, work before opening so nothing interrupts the day, and we are licensed and insured with a certificate of insurance available for landlords and property managers.