Our New Old House

Who’d have ever thought I’d be using the mirror I carry in my purse to help out on a house project?

I wanted to make sure I removed all the paint from the inside of the parting bead because the moving window sashes would eventually break away the paint and release lead into the home in years to come. I was surprised how much I had missed when I finally pulled out my mirror to take a look.

One more round of chemical stripping, coming right up!

Admitting you have a problem is the first step toward getting over it. In my case, blogging about having rehabber’s block helped me re-focus my attention on the things that have been holding me back.

In the case of my window restoration project I kept running into setbacks with the hardware and the fact that I got bored sanding by hand. I decided I’d just have to suck it up about the sanding but the hardware was a tougher problem.

Like everything else in our house that shouldn’t have been painted the window hardware was all painted over. I used the handy dandy ammonia trick as seen in this post but the paint was hard to get out of the moving parts.

I soaked them too long and they rusted.

So I got hung up on how to fix the hardware. Finally, I just said, “You know what? I can get new hardware that looks like old hardware for the same amount as it would take to restore the old hardware.” Block dissolved.

Don’t worry, preservationists, I’m going to pack the old hardware away for any future rehabbers who want to take on the task. But as I looked through the rest of the hardware on the windows around my house, I noticed a few have missing pieces anyway. I might as well make them all match.

So with that block out of the way I continued working on the window frame I’m prepping.

I wanted to make sure and remove all the lead paint from the areas that will have moving parts, so I used Zinsser 5-layer chemical strip and then sanded the last bits of residue off. I followed each pass with the sandpaper with a wipe down with a wet cloth so the dust wouldn’t be airborne. I wore a mask and dusted the rest of the room with a damp cloth afterward too.

The frames are looking pretty good now!

Next up: replacing a broken sash cord and the benefits of being a girl home rehabber!

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!

Last time I showed you how I sanded the front bedroom floor. A splendid time was had by all.

But while I was having all that fun with the great big power tool, I had a niggling question in the back of my head: How much of this gorgeous oak is there left and how deep can I sand?

I knew the floor had been refinished years ago and whoever had done it had taken off WAY too much wood. When I took the quarter round trim off the baseboard it exposed the original height of the floor and it had been sanded a good 3 millimeters down. I didn’t know how much wood was there to start with so I sanded with caution. I would have liked to go deeper and take out some of the deeper flaws, but I was so afraid I’d go right through the bottom of the oak that I erred on the side of having floors with an “antiqued” look.

After I had returned the sander to the Tool Lending Library, I was scrounging around in my basement for a rag or something and came across a chunk of wood that had been cut out of the floor of our front bedroom closet. We’d had a furnace vent installed and the installer had cut a round piece out of the floor and just left it in the basement. This meant I had a perfect cross-section of my floor!

As you can see, there was plenty of wood to work with, so when I do future rooms, I’ll be sure to sand more aggressively and really get that brand new finish. As it was, I didn’t kick myself too hard over the floor I’d just done. After all, a big bed would end up covering up most of the flaws anyway.

Now that I had a piece of the original floor, I could practice things! So I clamped the chunk of wood to my work bench and went all mad scientist on it.

This was really exciting for me because I was thinking about changing the color of the stain to refinish the floors. See, the last time they were redone was around 1964. At that time they painted all the woodwork white and restained the floor a honey gold color. It was certainly a nice color, but when I stripped the paint off the woodwork to reveal the red oak stain underneath, it clashed with the yellowish color of the floor. I wanted to pick another color that would compliment the red oak trim better, so I picked up a can of Minwax in Cherry.

I sanded half of the boards in my sample so I could compare the colors and also so I’d have a second chance if I tried this and changed my mind.

I got a small can of Minwax Cherry stain and tried it out on the sanded wood. The instructions said to leave it on 10-15 minutes. I experimented with different times to get the right depth of stain.

The first round of stain was too light at 10 minutes.

But after the second round, giving it a couple more minutes, it came out just the way I wanted.

Now that I had the stain I wanted, I took my sample upstairs to compare it with the woodwork.

Keep in mind that I haven’t varnished the woodwork yet, so the color on that will come out a little deeper red when that’s done. But I was very happy with the cherry color, so I decided to proceed! Check back again soon to see the whole floor stained!