Window and siding replacement in St. Louis City
What the code and the permit desk actually require here — and what the houses in St. Louis City tend to be hiding behind the siding.
- People
- 278,144
- Homes
- 174,694
- Size
- 61.72 square miles
- ZIP codes
- 63101-63141, 63143-63147, 63150-63151, 63155-63158, 63160, 63163-63164, 63166-63167, 63169, 63171, 63177-63180, 63182, 63188, 63190, 63195, 63197-63199
- Founded or incorporated
- 1764
The city has a Cultural Resources Office/Preservation Board that administers 18 local historic districts (10 regular, 8 certified); population decline since the 1950 peak has left a significant stock of abandoned residential buildings and vacant lots.
St. Louis City
More than half of the city's housing (98,061 of 174,310 units's decade breakdown) was built 1939 or earlier — St. Louis's housing stock is dominated by early-20th-century brick two- and four-family flats and rowhouses, not a later suburban build-out.
What that vintage turns up
No median build year is published for St. Louis City. What follows is selected from its development history rather than from a figure, which is why no year appears on this page.
Windows of this age are wood, double-hung, and hung on cords and cast-iron weights running in pockets beside the jambs. They were built to be taken apart and repaired, and the part that fails first is the glazing putty, not the window. Once the putty goes the bottom rail and the sill start holding water, and the rot works down and outward from there. On a solid brick house the window sits in a masonry opening in a wood box frame, so replacing it is a flashing problem more than a window problem: there is no housewrap layer to lap into, which makes a site-built sill pan with a back dam the whole ballgame.
Most of what was built here before the war is solid brick, two or three wythes thick, and it cannot be sided. There is no stud, no sheathing and no cavity to work with — anything fastened to it means drilling through the one thing keeping the rain out, and the wall was designed to soak up water and dry it back out again rather than shed it. What these houses need is tuckpointing and lintel work, not cladding. The frame houses of the same age carry wood clapboard or shingle over board sheathing, and the rot on those is concentrated in the bottom two courses and the butt joints.
The one to watch on a house of this age
Steel lintels over the window and door openings rust, and rust takes up more room than steel did, so it lifts and cracks the brick courses sitting on top of it. If the brick above a window is stepping or the joint has opened, that is the lintel talking and no window will fix it.
Lead paint. Effectively certain. Anything of this age is a lead-paint job by default. 85.9% of the homes in City of St. Louis (independent city) were built before 1980, and on anything pre-1978 the EPA renovation rule applies to both of these trades. Window replacement is never exempt from it, at any size — a single window triggers it. A whole-house re-side clears the twenty square foot exterior threshold on the first wall. What the rule actually requires of a contractor.
Neighbourhoods
We work across Downtown, Midtown, The Hill, Soulard, Tower Grove South, Central West End, Lafayette Square, Forest Park Southeast, Shaw, Lindenwood Park, Grand Center and Carondelet.
Historic districts
St. Louis City has 12: Lafayette Square, Soulard Neighborhood, Central West End, Benton Park, Hyde Park, The Ville, Compton Hill, Fox Park, Skinker-DeBaliviere-Catlin Tract-Parkview, Union Station, Tower Grove East and Cherokee-Lemp Brewery. This matters more for windows than for almost any other kind of work. A visible change to a window on a designated property can need preservation review before a building permit will issue, and in the strictest districts in this metro the material the window is made of is written into the ordinance. Which local rules bite, and which are only advisory.
Next door
St. Louis City shares a boundary with St. Louis County and East St. Louis, Illinois (across the Mississippi River). Where we have a page for a neighbour it is linked; where we do not, the rules there are still different from the rules here.
The rules in St. Louis City
Siding replacement Conditional
The city's 'When a Residential Building Permit is Needed' page lists among work not requiring a building permit: 'new aluminum, steel or vinyl exterior siding with no change to existing openings.' So re-siding IS expressly listed as exempt work, but only for aluminum, steel or vinyl and only where existing wall openings are unchanged. The page does not address fiber-cement, wood, stucco or other siding materials, and the general rule on the same page is that 'A building permit is required when any structural change or major alteration is made to an existing building.' Separately, in a City Historic District the Cultural Resources Office requires a permit for all exterior work except painting wood trim, which captures re-siding regardless of the building-permit exemption.
Window replacement, same opening No permit Enlarging or cutting an opening Permit required
Exempt work on the residential permit criteria page includes 'replacement or repair of existing windows and frames, whenever no modification is made to the opening' and 'installation of storm windows and doors.' Like-for-like insert/pocket replacement in the same opening therefore needs no building permit. The exemption is expressly conditioned on 'no modification.
A replacement window here has to be U-0.32 or lower
'2018 International Energy Conservation Code, Ordinance 70799, Date adopted: 08-01-18' per the city's Building Codes Adopted by the City page. Listed alongside 2018 IBC (Ord. 70794), 2018 IRC (Ord. 70795), 2018 IEBC (Ord. 70797), 2018 IPMC (Ord. 70798), 2018 IMC (Ord. 70800), 2018 IFGC (Ord. 70801), 2017 NEC (Ord. 70802) and 2021 Uniform Plumbing Code (Ord. 71644, 02-20-2023).
That figure comes from the 2018 edition this jurisdiction has adopted.
A window fitted here must also carry an SHGC of 0.40 or lower.
For comparison, ENERGY STAR asks for U-0.25 or lower with an SHGC of 0.40 or lower everywhere in this metro, which is stricter than every code edition in force here. And the code only bites when the sash and the glazing are replaced together — replace the glass alone in an existing sash, or add a storm window over the top, and it does not apply.
What the permit costs
Building Division published fee table: $25.00 application fee per application, plus a permit fee based on estimated construction cost - $0-$1,000: $25 application + $19 permit = $44 total; $1,001-$2,000: $48 total; $2,001-$3,000: $55 total; over $3,000: $25 application fee + $10.00 per thousand estimated construction cost or fraction thereof. 'All fees paid to the City of St. Louis for building permits are non-refundable.'.
Local quirks
One of the few jurisdictions in this metro that publishes an explicit siding exemption AND an explicit window exemption. But the exemptions are material-specific (aluminum, steel or vinyl only) and opening-specific. The exemption is effectively cancelled inside City Historic Districts, where the Cultural Resources Office requires a permit for all exterior work except painting wood trim and names window replacement and door replacement as examples; each district has its own design standards. The city also runs permitting through a separate portal (stlcitypermits.com) rather than the main city site.
Who to call
- Building dept
- 314-622-3313
- Official
- Not published. Any site printing a name here is guessing.
- Permits
- Department page
Work we have done in St. Louis City
No completed job in St. Louis City on the books. Every other page on this site is sourced, so this one stays honest too.
Where these facts came from
Everything on this page about St. Louis City was read off a published source. Where a question has no published answer we have said so rather than filling the gap.
Sources: stlouis-mo.gov · stlouis-mo.gov · stlouis-mo.gov · stlouis-mo.gov · stlouis-mo.gov
Thinking about it in St. Louis City?
A measurement and a written scope costs you nothing and takes about an hour.
Tell us about the house
We answer the phone. If we miss you, we call back.