Windows for Christmas

Wed, 25 Apr 2007 19:48:49 GMT

For over a year the five windows on the front of my house were covered with plywood. None of my neighbors complained directly to me about the eyesore, but if they had, I was ready with a response. “Hurricane warning. Didn’t you hear?”

The original part of my house is over 200 years old, but by the time I bought the place, there wasn’t much left that was original. The stone foundation, the timber frame, and maybe some window sashes. I’m no purist. I never wanted to restore the place. I think houses are for living in and ought to adapt to their owner’s needs. But I also think renovations and additions ought to be sympathetic. They ought to look right. That’s what I was shooting for, and that’s why I decided to restore the windows on the front of the house.

“Restore” isn’t the right word. The original window frames were long gone, and I didn’t even know for sure that the sashes I had were original to the house. But the delicate muntins told me that they were very old, and I had enough sashes for five windows.

So a year and a half ago, I re-sided the front of the house. At the same time, I built and installed new window frames. Then I nailed plywood over the openings, and every weekend for the next year, I found things I would rather do than restore those old windows. They needed to have the old glass removed. They needed to be stripped of paint. Reglued, repaired, reglazed, repainted, and weatherstripped. It was not hard finding things I would rather do.

But last fall I finally got tired of living in the dark, and I promised myself windows for Christmas. With help from my father-in-law, I went to work on the windows. We set up down in the basement, with good light, David Gibney’s article “Restoring Window Sashes” open on the workbench, and old Steven Seagal movies on TV in the background.

We used heat guns to remove the window putty and got out much of the old glass without breaking it. More work with heat guns and lots of scraping got rid of the paint. We used Abatron’s epoxy products to repair any rot and to reglue loose joints. We sanded. We primed. And then, in a rare display of good sense, I paid a local window shop to reglaze the sash (eight sashes, 12 lites each, $150). After that we painted and painted and painted.

Most of the time we were at this work, I told myself we were crazy for doing it. From the midst of the project, it looked like way too much effort for a highly questionable result. The sashes seemed impossibly flimsy, and with my nose six inches away, I winced every time our overzealous scraping removed precious wood along with the paint. More than anything, though, I doubted my ability to make the windows functional and weathertight.

My faith began returning after we reglued the sashes, but I didn’t actually recognize it until we primed them. It was like the feeling you get when you pour footings. You’re finally starting to move out of the ground instead of digging into it. By the time we got the sashes back from the glass shop, they were as rigid as could be. The tedium of two more coats of paint was almost bearable, and I thought to myself, “This might just work.”

We installed the windows a week before Christmas. I used a combination of vinyl-bulb and brush weatherstipping from Resource Conservation Technology, some of it in the stops and some of it in the sash. I guessed right about the tolerances (or close enough). The upper sashes are fixed, but the lower ones slide up and down smoothly; I prop them open with a stick.

A month later, I installed traditional wooden storm windows, also with vinyl-bulb weatherstripping, giving me three inches of dead-air space. I never saw a lick of frost on the glass all winter, and I’m convinced the windows are at least as energy efficient as the new Marvins with true divided lites and energy panels installed elsewhere else in the house.

The desk where I’m writing this sits in front of my restored windows. I look up often at the imperfections in the glass, the scars in the muntins, and the patterns of sunlight cast upon the floor. I think about how close I came to pitching those old sashes into the dumpster. It would have been so easy to buy new windows. And I am reminded once again that, as with so many things in life, the hard way is usually the right way.

Better Than Plumb

Windows for Christmas