Broken window in Berwick: what to do in the first hour
Shoes on, everyone out of the room, internal door shut so a child or a dog cannot wander in. Lift the big pieces into a cardboard box, then press packing tape over the fragments left in carpet and lift them out with it. Board the opening from the inside with ply, an old shelf or a flat-packed box taped hard to the reveal, not plastic sheet that flaps and tears. Photograph it before you clean up. Then call. A make-safe board-up in Berwick is $250 to $450 in business hours, $400 to $700 after 6pm, and a single reglaze is $180 to $380.
The order matters more than the speed. Secure people first, evidence second, the opening third, the repair last. Most of the money lost after a broken window is lost in the eight hours after the break, not in the break itself.
The first hour, in order
Get anyone barefoot out of the room and check the far corners. Glass from a smashed toughened panel travels three or four metres and finishes under the sofa. If the break is in a door or a low panel, assume the whole sheet is compromised and keep people out of the doorway entirely. Shut the internal door and lay a towel along the gap so a cat cannot push through overnight.
Take photographs before you touch anything: a wide shot of the room, a wide shot from outside, a close shot of the frame and the broken edges, and a shot of whatever caused it. If a branch came through, leave the branch where it fell for one photo. Your phone stamps the time on those files, and that is the most useful ten minutes of work you can do for an insurance claim. There is more on that in our window insurance claim guide.
Then board it. Rigid board on the inside face, taped or screwed to the timber reveal, beats plastic every time. Plastic drums in the wind all night, tears by 3am and lets rain onto the sill. If the frame is empty but the aluminium bead is still gripping shards, leave them. That is the job that puts people in the emergency department, and it takes five minutes with the right gloves and a bead tool.
Window and door fault triage: how urgent is it really
Find your symptom and read across. Prices are fitted, 2026, for the City of Casey.
| Symptom | What it usually means | How urgent | Typical cost to put right |
|---|---|---|---|
| Glass out, open hole to the street or yard | Impact, storm debris or forced entry. The house is insecure and open to weather. | Now | Board-up $250-$450, reglaze $180-$380 |
| Cracked, but the pane is still in one piece | Thermal stress or a knock. Stable if it is a fixed pane away from a doorway. | This week | $180-$380 reglaze |
| Glass in small cubes, still hanging in the frame | Toughened safety glass has let go, usually from an edge nick or an inclusion in the glass. | Now | $450-$900 toughened panel |
| Crack in a door, a panel beside a door, or glass under 500mm off the floor | Safety glazing. Under AS 1288 it goes back as Grade A safety glass, toughened or laminated. | Now | $450-$900 |
| Sliding door will not lock, or the latch snapped | Worn keeper or a broken latch body. The house is insecure even though nothing is broken. | Now if it opens to a rear yard | $150-$280 fitted |
| Slider off its track and jammed part open | Collapsed rollers, almost always after years of grit in the track. | Now | Rollers $180-$350, new door $1,800-$3,500 if the track is chewed out |
| Water running in at the sill during rain | Blocked weep holes or failed perimeter sealant, rather than broken glass. | This week | Weep holes free to clear, re-seal $180-$350, reveal make-good $180-$480 |
| Whistling draught and torn rubber after a storm | Perished wool pile and gaskets. A comfort and energy problem, not a safety one. | Can wait | $120-$260 per sash |
| Mist or fogging between the two panes | The seal on the insulated glass unit has failed. It cannot be dried out or defogged reliably. | Can wait | $450-$950 per unit, 1-3 weeks to make |
| Frame bent or pushed in after a car, branch or forced entry | The sash or frame is out of square. New glass in a twisted frame will crack again. | This week | $580-$2,800 depending on size |
| Timber sash rattles and the sill feels spongy | Rot in the sill or bottom rail, common on pre-1990 Berwick and Endeavour Hills homes. | Book it in | Sill repair $350-$900, new sash $1,200-$2,400 |
| Flyscreen cut or torn, glass untouched | Attempted entry or a possum. Nothing structural. | Can wait | $60-$120 per screen |
Indicative fitted prices for Berwick and the City of Casey in 2026. Full per-window rates are on our pricing page.
What makes it worse between now and the repair
Rain through an open reveal is the expensive part. Water gets behind the architrave, wicks into the plasterboard and the bottom plate, and a fortnight later you are paying $180 to $480 a window for reveal and architrave make-good on top of the glass. Board on the inside, then run a strip of tape along the top edge so nothing runs down behind the board.
Do not tape over the weep holes in the bottom of an aluminium frame while you are at it. Those little slots are the drainage path, and sealing them turns the sill into a bath. The same goes for stuffing towels into the track of a slider and forgetting them. Wet cotton against powder-coated aluminium for two weeks leaves a mark that will not buff out.
If water has run over a power point, a light switch or into a downlight below the window, switch that circuit off at the switchboard and get an electrician before you use it again. If the frame is bent and the sash is jamming against the glass, stop working the handle. Every push loads the pane and turns a $180 reglaze into a $580 sash.
Safe to do yourself, and what genuinely is not
Safe: sweeping and taping up fragments, boarding a ground-floor opening from the inside, photographing damage, turning off irrigation that sprays the opening, killing a circuit at the switchboard, and clearing a blocked weep hole with a plastic cable tie.
Not safe, and not worth it: pulling shards out of a glazing bead by hand, because the bead grips them and then releases them all at once. Lifting out a toughened panel that is still standing, because it is holding itself together and will collapse in your arms. Anything above ground level off a ladder, particularly on the reactive clay across Casey where one ladder foot sinks after rain. Cutting and fitting your own glass: ordinary float glass in a doorway or a low panel is not compliant glazing, and an insurer will treat it as damage you never repaired.
Break-ins have one extra step. Report it to Victoria Police and get the report number before you clean up, because most insurers will not progress a malicious damage claim without one. If entry is still happening, that is a triple zero call, not a glazier call.
Boarded up and need it done properly?
Send three photos and the opening size and we will price the permanent fix, usually within the hour on a weekday.
After-hours call-out versus waiting until Monday
A Friday night board-up in Narre Warren costs $400 to $700 all up. The same board-up at 8am Monday is $250 to $450, and if the permanent reglaze goes ahead the same day the attendance fee is credited back. So the after-hours decision is worth $150 to $350, and it turns on one question: can the opening be made safe and secure tonight by you?
Call us out tonight if the opening is big enough to climb through and faces a rear yard, a laneway or a side gate; if it is raining or forecast to; if someone in the house cannot be kept away from the glass; or if a door panel has gone and that door is the only thing between the house and the street. Everything else usually waits. A first-floor bedroom window with a board taped over it and the door shut is not an emergency, it is a Monday job.
When it is not an emergency at all, and waiting saves money
Several of the calls we take every week are not emergencies, and we say so on the phone. A fogged double-glazed unit looks alarming and is purely cosmetic until it is replaced, and since the unit is made to order over 1 to 3 weeks there is nothing to gain from a night rate. A sliding door that has gone heavy is worn rollers, and it will keep working for a fortnight while we bring the correct rollers instead of a generic set. A hairline crack in a fixed high-level pane will sit there taped for a month without drama.
Two more honest ones. If your windows are 1990s chalky aluminium and three of them have failed in a year, patching each break one at a time is money down the drain: read the signs you need new windows and price the whole job instead. And if the glass broke because the frame has dropped with the house on reactive clay, new glass alone means new glass again next winter. We would rather quote the frame once. That is the difference between an emergency reglaze and the planned work described on our sliding door replacement and aluminium window pages.
We do not run 24 hour glass across all of Melbourne, we do not board up commercial shopfronts and we do not take on owners corporation common property glass. We cover Berwick, Narre Warren, Cranbourne, Hampton Park and Endeavour Hills, and we would rather send you elsewhere than turn up late to a job outside that patch. Keeping windows out of trouble in the first place is covered in our window maintenance schedule.
Emergency window questions we get asked
How much does an emergency window board-up cost in Berwick?
Can I tape a cracked window and leave it until next week?
Do I need a whole new window or just the glass?
What happens if the broken pane is double glazed?
Should I put a broken window through insurance?
Is there a call-out fee for an urgent window job in Casey?
Boarded up? Get the permanent repair priced today
Tell us what broke and where, and we come back with a fitted price and the earliest install date, usually within one business day.
Glass out right now in Berwick or Casey?
Call and describe it. If it can safely wait until morning we will tell you, and book you in cheaper.