Our New Old House

In my last post (Are your sashes slotted?) I mentioned that I had Shull’s strip the paint off my window sashes in their dunk tank. They did a great job but as with any paint removal project, I had some sanding to do. Here’s how they looked when I got them back:

I sanded them….

And they looked brand new!

It was time to start staining them. With the collection of substances I had to wipe on and wipe off I felt like I was running some kind of window sash spa. Cleaners, moisturizers, colors… maybe I was just wishing I could be at a spa myself. Anyway, I first wiped the sashes down with mineral spirits, then used Pre-Stain wood conditioner. The Pre-Stain is optional, but recommended for softer woods. My windows are some kind of fir or pine, so definitely a soft wood. Then I used the Red Oak color of Minwax wood stain to match my existing woodwork.

Here they are with the Pre-Stain:

Here’s what it looked like mid-staining:

I laid them out on plastic while I waited the 15 minutes for the stain to soak in.

Here are the first sashes stained:

Here are some stained and some not yet stained:

And all six sashes stained:

Next up: Replacing the glass! Check back soon and we’ll get to glazing!

When I left off in my last post (Window Prep Continues) I had removed the glazing putty and taken all the panes of glass out of the sashes to prep them for stripping at Shull’s.

I hope to do a more full-length post about Shull’s, but in case anyone needs to know, here are the basics: Shull’s is a furniture refinishing business in Valley Junction and they are the go-to place for having large things stripped of paint quickly and easily. From what I understand they have a large tank of chemicals and they submerge items to have the paint stripped off. Apparently they can do whole doors, and possibly larger items. Anyway, they had six sashes done for me within a day or so for about $130. For those items you just don’t want to spend the time stripping by hand, or for delicate pieces that need to have the paint soaked free, Shull’s is the place to go. (515) 255-9449

I got them back and my next step would be to cut a slot on each side of the sashes for the weatherstripping to fit into. For that I needed a router with a 5/32″ slotting bit. A Des Moines Rehabbers Club member was kind enough to loan me his plunge router and bit. Now, I LOVE power tools and I’m always excited to get my hands on a new one. This one was particularly fun and I was reluctant to give it back. I may just have to buy myself one someday and find things to use it on.

Here’s what the 5/32″ slotting bit looks like:

We had lots of fun at the Rehabbers Club Meeting demonstrating how to cut the slots for the weatherstripping.

And here are some pictures of how the slot looks. (Remember, the letters I etched in the sides are how I will match the sashes up to their original frames and panes of glass when I put them all back together.)

Don’t make the mistake I made here. In this next photo you can see I clamped the window on the side I had cut. I found out later the clamp had cracked the sash a little. I repaired it and all was well, but I learned my lesson. Only clamp the solid top and bottom. And use a rag so the clamp doesn’t bite into the wood.

I also damaged one of the muntins (that’s the wood between the small panes in an upper sash) when I was removing the glazing so I did a quick glue and clamp to repair that.

Here are my two damaged sashes waiting for the glue to set. The bottle of Citristrip is acting as a weight clamp for one of the sashes.

Now that the sashes were cut and repaired it was time to finish removing the remaining paint and varnish, give them a good sanding, and prepare them to be reglazed. Check back in my next post to see those steps.

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!

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!

A few weeks ago I attended Bob Yapp‘s workshop about weatherizing windows. It was sponsored by the Center on Sustainable Communities.

Bob showed us a system of adding metal rails for the original wood sashes to run on that blocked air from coming around the sides of the sashes and helped the sashes open and close more smoothly.

Doug Burnett of Burnett Realty has started using the system on the windows in a 1910 farmhouse near Runnells and since I was just about to start my window project, he offered to let me come see how he’d done it and gave me some tips for how to put Bob Yapp’s suggestions into practice.

One of the things he showed me was that a circular saw could be used to make the slots for the metal rails. He used a table saw.

One modification Doug made to Bob’s plan was in his measurement for the top sash. Because the wheel for the sash cord is in the way, he couldn’t put the rail all the way to the top. But with stops on both sides of the sash, he wasn’t concerned about any cold air getting through at that spot. He measured the rail to start just below the wheel and end an inch below the bottom of the sash.

After he’d cut the length, he lopped off the corners to make them less sharp and more attractive.

One side of the rails is installed with a staple gun (the kind that’s like a nail gun run off an air compressor) like so:

The other side is installed with screws so it can be removed later if needed.

Doug drilled pilot holes into the strips between the corrugated ridges. He used a drill bit that was larger than needed to accommodate the shaft of the screw so that the screw head has room to sink into the strip and not catch on the sash as it slides up and down the rail. Drilling through the strip left some pretty bad burrs on the back of the strip, which would make it hard to slide the strip into place with the sash, so he used a belt sander to remove the burrs and smooth the back of the strips. A steel file or a rasp would work for this too.

These are the screws he used (took this picture so I’d know which screws to pick out at the hardware store):

Doug also replaced some of the sash cord.

We successfully installed the upper and lower sashes with the steel rails and there was much rejoicing. Mostly we ate cookies.

Check back with my next post to see how we prepped a newly constructed sash to be fitted for sash ropes and shaved down the bottom side of the sash to meet the angle of the sill. There’s much more to come!