Burns Avenue House thru CERT Program

I joined the CERT (Central Certification Program) which is a collaboration among Ramsey County, Hennepin County, the City of Saint Paul, and the City of Minneapolis to "promote market growth and increase the competitiveness of qualified small businesses." Participation in CERT streamlines the process of bidding on and contacting for work on renovating government-owned houses in those three jurisdictions. The centralized certification process, which cuts down on having to certify separately for each job and replaces it with an annual certification, makes it much easier for a small business like mine to access contracts available with Ramsey County and the City of Saint Paul. My shop is a one-man operation. I don't have any office staff to help me with all the paperwork involved in getting certified as a responsible bidder for every job. Only having to do it once a year truly makes it even possible for a one-man shop like mine to bid on window replacement and renovation jobs at the City and County. It has worked out well for me.

The first job I got in the CERT program was a house on Burns Avenue on Saint Paul's East Side. I replaced 17 windows and repaired __ more. This photo shows some of the windows in my shop after construction, but before applying primer paint. I always prime my windows with oil-based primer before delivering them to my customers. I do offer the service of painting the windows if the client supplies the paint to match other windows at the house, but most clients prefer to do the painting themselves. Especially with a large project like the Burns Avenue house, the clients usually have already contracted with a professional painter.

I don't know if it is visible with the scale of this photo, but all my windows are designed to shed water without caulking. My clients never have to caulk their windows, which is one of the reasons for the popularity of my business. I have a video showing how this process, that was designed in my shop, works.

This photo shows the windows installed at the Burns Avenue house. The windows, except for the large picture window, have four "lights." Lights are just the number of separate windowpanes there are in a window. I do not add a fake cross piece of wood to just make it look like four lights. I build the window with four integral wood members with stops so that four separate glass panes are rabbited in to create the look you see on the photo. This is the way historic windows were made, and my business is authentically re-creating those historic windows.

I do replace doors as well, but was not selected to replace the doors on this particular project.