Our New Old House

Wishing you and your house a safe and warm holiday season!
-Kelli and Brandon

Since we moved our bedroom furniture into the front bedroom I’ve started stripping the wallpaper off the walls. This wallpaper is one of my blog’s greatest hits. People comment on it all the time. I’m a little sad to see it go.

But there it goes!

Now that I’ve been briefed on how Bob Yapp’s window restoration system is supposed to work it’s time to get to work on my own windows! Fortunately, mine aren’t as big as the ones at Doug Burnett’s farm house but if you’ve seen me at five feet tall and if you’ve seen Doug at, oh I don’t know, EIGHT FEET TALL you’ll agree that these windows are just my size.

If you’d like to take a walk down memory lane and see the very beginning of the process, here are two posts from 2008 that show how to take out the windows and some explanation about what you’ll find when you do.

http://www.ournewoldhouse.com/windows-to-the-soul/

http://www.ournewoldhouse.com/my-windows-the-lost-images/

So I already had the sashes out of the frames. The glazing on my windows is all dried and crumbling, so the first step I need to take is to remove all that old gunk and take the panes of glass out. But my first step before THAT (This is how my brain does these projects, by the way. If my brain were a book it would have a dozen of those pages in front that were numbered with lower case roman numerals.) was to come up with a labeling system for the window panes I was about to remove. My previous system of a scrap of masking tape was not going to cut it. These window panes were precisely cut and fit to these frames and getting them mixed up and out of order would make putting them back impossible.

So I labeled each window sash and etched the label into the hidden side of the sash with my Dremel tool. I’ll explain later why I etched it and didn’t just pencil or marker it.

“E” means east and “R” means right. This is the right hand window of the east wall in my front bedroom. Since I’m doing one room at a time, that’s enough labeling.

Then I needed to match up the panes of glass to the window and mark which part of the frame they’d go into. For that I used a Sharpie.

Ok, I confess. I didn’t think of labeling the panes until after I’d already taken them out. But I’m trying to help YOU with this blog, so do as I say not as I did. Cool? Cool.

So, back to the glazing removal.

With just a screwdriver and an occasional tap with a rubber mallet the stuff pops right off.

Here’s a corner of the window were the glazing has been removed.

Some of the glazing wasn’t quite as old. It seems someone had done some repairs at some point. Pretty mediocre if you ask me, but better than nothing I guess.

This stuff didn’t chip away quite as easily. It was kind of gummy and hard to crumble with a screwdriver.

That’s okay! That just means it’s time for a new tool! I used my Dremel with a coarse sandpaper bit to grind the stuff out. (Don’t forget to put on your mask BEFORE you get a faceful of airborne white powder.)

Once I had the old glazing chipped out, I removed these little metal tabs that hold the glass in place. I can’t remember what they’re called, so if anybody reading this knows, would you please comment and let me know? These aren’t meant to hold the glass in, really, they’re just meant to hold it steady with even spacing while the glazing is applied. It’s the glazing that holds the glass in and seals up the cracks around the edges.

With some gentle pressure underneath and a little wiggling, the panes of glass popped out. So far in my first batch of windows, I’ve only lost one of the small panes. It was very brittle, a goner from the start, there was nothing we could do. But the rest came out fine! See?

Also, check out the cool edge on this piece. It was cut this way a hundred years ago!

So there ya go! A window sash minus the glass. I initially intended to strip these using the heat gun and Citristrip, but after doing one I decided to just take the glass-free sashes to a local place and have them dunk-stripped. I’ll let know know where and how it goes once I do that.

Here’s one I started stripping with the heat gun:

A couple of the sashes ready to go to the dunk-stripper:

And the panes ready to be put back in later:

I took the hardware off the sashes too. They’ll get stripped in ammonia and re-painted to match the door hardware in the rest of the house.

Phew! This has been a big post! That’s all for now! Check back soon for more updates!

In addition to all the great tips and experience I got working with Doug Burnett, I got to explore his cool old farm house near Runnells. When I saw the house, inside and out, I thought if the Waltons’ house hadn’t burned down on the TV show, this is what it might look like today.

Oh, did I spoil the ending for you?

Anyway, this 1910 farm house was owned by the same family since the 1940s and the latest couple living there were extreme hoarders. The house has been emptied and parts of it gutted for renovation. I wandered around and took pictures.

Basement:

Living room:

Kitchen wallpaper:

Door hardware:

Gas light in the front entryway:

Stairway off the living room:

Looking up to the first landing:

Looking down from the second landing:

Looking up from the second landing:

Looking down from the doorway in the second landing. These stairs go down to the kitchen.

There are four bedrooms:

Detail of heat vent and light switch in a bedroom:

Upstairs bathroom:

Door hardware upstairs:

Ladder to the attic:

A peek at the attic:

I can’t wait to check back in several months and see what kind of progress Doug’s made!

When Doug Burnett showed me the window sashes we were going to install with Bob Yapp‘s method of weatherizing strips, I didn’t notice at first that some were newly constructed recreations of the originals. He used mortise and tenon joints and stained and painted them to match the originals, so they really fit the character of the original windows. Since it was new construction fitting into the frame of an old, settled house some small adjustments had to be made here and there, but the ultimate effect was well worth it.

One thing Doug and I both agreed on was that measuring and lining everything up as squarely as possible is very important, but that when working with old houses, you just get a knack for eyeballing if something needs to be shaved down on one side or built a little less than square from the beginning. A perfectionist will have some serious personal growth to accomplish if they ever want to fix up an old house because inevitably one side of a window will need to be a millimeter wider than the other, or the bottom of a door will have to be shaved to fit the slanted floor it closes over. This is where the exact science of construction meets the artistry of craftsmanship. Only by finding balance between the two will you have a happy home renovating experience.

In Doug’s case, he had to bore holes on each side deep enough to let the sash cord knot sink into without blocking the channel through which the metal weatherizing rail would slide. This took a bit of trial and error, but he eventually figured out just the right depth.

He carved out the channel for the sash cord with a curved chisel. (I helped on this one.)

So, here’s one end of the sash with the hole and channel for the sash cord. If you look closely at the bottom you can see that the sash has been slotted for the weatherizing rail too.

Unfortunately I didn’t take good pictures of both of the sashes, but here’s the original sash:

And here’s the reproduction Doug built:

When we put the newly constructed sash into the window frame we realized that the bottom of the sash was not slanted to meet the sill. Window sills are slanted at about a 10 degree angle to allow water to run toward the outside of the house. The bottom of our sash was square so it didn’t allow the meeting rails to fit level when the sashes were closed. Doug shaved off one corner of the bottom of the sash to match the angle of the sill better.

With that little extra effort the new sash fit in perfectly and after we had it installed you couldn’t tell by looking at it that the bottom sash was brand new and the top sash was 100 years old.

Check back next time and I’ll take you on a tour of Doug’s cool old farmhouse!