Storm's a coming

Storm windows seem to be the topic du jour these days. I'm writing about them. Stucco House is writing about them. Even our friends in Amsterdam are writing about them. Our storm windows have been off and on my mind for the last three years, especially ever since we had one completely fall apart on us when we took it down in 2008. The corner had completely rotted through. The only thing keeping it together was a bit of paint.

I had hoped that buying replacement storm windows would be as easy as calling the local hardware store or lumber mill. I was wrong. I'm sure there is someone in the area that could make me new storm windows at a reasonable price, but I couldn't find them. The only person I found didn't really want to make them ("It's a waste of money. Just go to Menard's and get an Aluminum storm window."), and he quoted me $400, which did not include the glazing.

So being an independent, self-sufficient minded American, I opted to make my own. I spent the last three years acquiring a table saw, a router table and several router bits. And now I've finally finished the last four storms for the house.




I suspect that most wood workers would have found this a fairly simple project, but it turned out to be a challenge for me, especially figuring out how the mortise and tenons fit together with the routed ogee edge. I'm pleased with how they turned out, and I'm glad the hard part is done now. The windows are currently getting glazed and then they will need two more coats of paint to finish them off. If all goes as planned, I'll have them up by the end of November.

Crunch Time

Winter is coming and if ever there was a time when I felt like the little ant, its now. I have double hung dining room windows that need to be painted and re-assembled. I have transom windows that need to be painted, hinged and installed. I have contractors coming to replace my front entry roof and gutters. I have bead board and trim that needs painting for the front entry. I have a furniture refinishing contractor coming to take off my front door and reface it. A lawnmower to winterize. Storm windows to make and install. Lamb bits to bury. Windows to clean. Yard and garden work. Tools to put away. Garage to clean.

I think I'm
s
i
n
k
i
n
g
.
.
.

Marathon

Intelligence is knowing the right thing to do. Wisdom is applying it.

My folks came out this weekend to visit and to help with various projects. We opted to have have my mom paint and my dad work on assembling the playground for the girls. We did a lot of work, but somehow it doesn't feel like we got ahead. I sat down after they left and compiled a list of all the things that need to get done.

• Finish the playground - My dad and I made good progress, but the slide still remains, and until it's done we're paranoid about letting the girls play on it. There's a hole in the side of the playground that ends in a six foot drop. This also includes landscaping around the playground with mulch, grass and a few shrubs, flowers or bushes.
  
• Assemble 18 screens - Our house came with only three or four full screens. Last fall I built frames for 18 more screens, so that every room would have at least one screen. The frames are assembled and thanks to my mom, they are now all primed and painted, but the screens still need to be stretched on them and then trim placed around the edges to pretty them up.
  
• Mulch our yews - The area where I took out the honeysuckle recently is a large black spot that all the neighborhood weeds and buckthorn are eyeing hungrily. I've had to wake up a few times at two in the morning, just to go out and wave a torch or club at them. "Back, back damn invasives!" It's the only thing keeping them from walking over and transplanting themselves into the fecund soil. A little mulch and grass seed might keep them at bay.
  
• Paint the dining room windows - I've refinished the majority of the trim, but the double hung windows are still shockingly off white. They need to be painted a nice shade of brown to match. Unfortunately the current paint on them is in bad shape and needs to be scraped or stripped. I had hoped we could paint them, but after looking at them I now see this is not an option.
  
• Repair and reassemble the dining room windows - To make it easier to paint the windows, I took all the dining room windows apart. Now is the time to replace the old cotton sash cords with metal chains and add some spring bronze weather stripping. Two windows above the buffet were nailed in place. We'll be converting these so that they open.
  
• Repair or replace the dining room picture rail - I wrote about this one recently. No more to say here other than that I can't make up my mind what to do about the picture rail.
  
• Cut, split, haul and stack the various pieces of firewood that has found it's way into my yard - I swear I don't know where it came from or who put it there.
  
• Make four storm windows - This has been extremely time consuming. I don't really know what I'm doing so it's a lot of trial and error.
  
• Repair the plaster in the guest room and paint the walls - This was meant to be a winter project. Now it's looking like a next winter project.
  
• Re-roof the garage - The shingles are getting old and don't match the new house shingles. I ordered extra when we shingled the house. They are sitting in my garage, waiting to be put on. That also includes new gutters and new fascia where it is rotting.
  
• Do the spring trimming - Various trees, forsythias and honeysuckle.
  
• Put in the garden - It's still too early, but in two weeks or so, it's going to be time. And as an aside, I've been reading Teaming with Microbes. If you are a serious gardener or just like microbes, pick it up. It's a fascinating read and will change the way you look at soil. Although, I'm not sure it's good party conversation - bacteria, fungi, slime molds and protozoa - yum!
  
• Start the front entry project - This is the main house project for the year. This is the one project that must get done this year. The roof, gutters and soffit need replacing. We're hiring this one out, so it won't need any work from me - just a lot of oversight.
  
• Set up blacksmith forge - My dad put the word out back home and he thinks he found me a portable forge. If so, I should have a forge within a month. That will open up a whole new list of projects for me!
  

There's an old saying, "When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging." I know this, but every time I look down, I always seem to have a shovel in my hand.

Scope Creep

Most of my blog entries are written over lunch at work. This works great except when work is so busy that I have to skip lunch. Work has been very busy the last few weeks. I try to work regular hours (07:00 to 16:00) and when the workload piles on, it means something has to give.

In February I had mentioned a post about scope creep. If you aren't familiar with scope creep, then you are fortunate enough to have never worked on projects in the corporate world. The meaning will be clear soon enough.

About a year ago I came home and Ms. Huis informed me that she had heard a loud thud from one of the windows in the dining room. It didn't take her long to deduce that the thud had come from a broken rope holding the sash weight for our double hung windows. The rope was likely the original one and after 88 years, it had frayed or rotted to the point that it couldn't hold the twenty pound steel weight on the other end.

This broken weight was like the proverbial flapping of the butterfly’s wings. I could have run down to the hardware store, bought a few dollars worth of cotton rope, reattached it to the window and the weight and been done with it. That would have been the sensible thing to do. If I had done that, I wouldn't be writing this.

It so happens that somewhat coincidentally, about the time this rope broke, I had just ordered and received a copy of Working Windows by Terry Meany. It's a great book for anyone with double hung windows. I won't go into the merits (and drawbacks) of old double hung windows here. That's cause for a whole post in itself and has been exhaustively argued in other places on the net. I will say though, that book does a great job explaining double hung windows and how they are put together.

So one July or August weekend last year, I opted to take apart our window with the broken sash weight. I noticed that both sashes needed to have putty reapplied in places. And they needed paint. So I put on our wooden storm window and took out the top and bottom sash. I put them in the basement, where I forgot about them all summer.

When winter came though, and I was looking for inside projects, these looked like a great project, so after about six hours I removed all the putty from the bottom sash, took out the glazing, lightly sanded the frame, put down a bed of putty, put the glazing back and then re-puttied the glazing. It was not enjoyable. When I looked at the top sash, which had eight panes of glass instead of one, I winced at the thought of re-puttying all those panes. They still need doing.

One of the things that has always bothered my about the dining room is that the original owners bothered to install a quarter-sawn oak floor, but opted to paint the trim. The house was set up to give clues to visitors as to when they were in a formal or informal room. Formal rooms were installed with quarter sawn oak and stained. Informal rooms were installed with birch flooring and the trim was painted white. The fact that the floor in the dining room was oak, but the trim was painted white was inconsistent, especially when there was a stained buffet along the north wall.

So one December weekend, I started ripping the trim off from around the windows. I thought I would strip it and refinish it. Then I noticed that due to the location of the radiator, the only way to get some of the baseboard trim off was if the window trim was off. Before I put the window trim back, I had to remove the baseboard and trim. And if I was going to take that off, I might as well take off the picture rail.

Stripping all of this myself would have taken a long time and probably exposed me and my family to lead paint and chemicals. So I opted to get the wood stripped professionally. I had the trim from around the window stripped first.

Here's a picture of the trim the day we last painted the dining room.



Here's a picture of the window after the trim was off.



And a picture after I stained, varnished and reinstalled the trim.



During all this time, another sash weight rope broke and fell, which means I'm contemplating putting in chains in place of rope for the sash weights. And the sashes should be weather stripped with spring bronze to decrease air infiltration. And of course we don't plan on keeping the sashes white, so those will need to be painted.

The picture rail I pulled down was not in very good shape. It was warped, nicked up and had one break in it that had been clumsily repaired. On top of that, while removing the nails in it, I broke a section of the picture rail (doh!). The picture rail profile matched the more informal picture rail upstairs. The first floor was also missing picture rail in the office, the kitchen and the entry way. So rather than pay to have the old picture rail stripped, we're opting to replace it with new, and install it in all of the above rooms.

When all of this is finished, we'll have a dining room with stained wood, picture rail in every room of the first floor, and double hung windows in the dining room that operate smoothly and are as energy efficient as traditional double hung windows can be. My guess is that it will end up costing just shy of $1000.

I think now that replacing the cotton rope might have been a better choice. Scope creep.

Mouse LIII

Mouse 52. Yawn. Yawn. I was becoming immune to the horror of it all - the intermittent but ongoing maiming and killing of rodentia. Then came mouse number 53. He was small and gray with big black eyes, rounded ears and a sad little twitchy nose. I met him last weekend when he tried to "hide" by my foot in the basement. He ran away before I could catch him. And he was very cute.

Monday night I found him on the basement floor, near death. We don't put out poison, so I can only surmise that his impending demise was the result of disease or insufficient food supplies. I picked him up with a gloved hand. He breathed out a labored breath and tried to arch his back. I carried him up to show the girls and then took him outside near the compost heap. If he has enough energy to forage for food, he won't need to forage far. I don't think he's going to make it though, poor thing.

Sometime ago one of the ropes broke in a double hung window of our dining room. I took both the upper and lower sashes out (quite honestly, I think just to see if I could). But so long as they are out...

One of the things that really bothers me is the painted woodwork in our dining room. The original owners were very careful about how they choose the flooring for their house. The used oak flooring in the public spaces of the house (the entryway, the living room, and the dining rooms) and "cheap" yellow birch flooring everywhere else. The trim and woodwork in the entryway and the living room are stained oak. The trim and woodwork in the dining room though is painted white. It doesn't match. I have always wanted to strip the paint off the woodwork in the dining room and stain it to match the oak floors and the entryway/living room woodwork. It's funny how one small cotton rope breaking was all that I needed to convince myself (and my wife) that the windows needed a complete overhaul, including the window trim.

The problem is that having windows disassembled in winter leaves a gaping hole. Even in our case, where I have the storms on, a single pane of glass isn't nearly as good as two, which means the race is on to get the window put back together, along with the all of the trim I pulled off. In the interest of getting the job down quickly, I took all the window trim (about 100 linear feet of it) to a local paint stripping place. If people have any experience with prices, please let me know. This place charges $1.80 per linear foot for any piece that is 6" or less in width. And another $2.20 on top of that to finish. That was a little more than I was expecting.

The upshot is that in three or four weeks, I should have the window trim ready to be stained and varnished.

KISS

Keep it simple stupid.

Repairs for the exterior of the house have proceeded from the top down, which meant a few weeks ago I needed to paint the back dormer. I took out the windows to perform maintenance on them, mostly just painting and a bit of puttying. In the process I succeeded in breaking a pane. In the past I had gone to the local hardware store for my glass, but this time I opted to visit a glazier who was a few extra miles down the road.

The store was set up with displays of mirrors and glass doors for shower enclosures. There was one small corner dedicated to modern windows that he was reselling. I found myself wondering what kind of sales he has seeing now that traditional windows with single pane glass were not the norm. I suppose if he was able to sell new windows, rather than repair old, he probably did quite well in the housing bubble of the last few years. But now that the housing bubble had burst...who knows?

The point of going to the glazier was to ask about all my options for fixing the window - single pane, double pane, inserts, low emissivity glass, tinted glass, etc. He threw in a few other options that I wasn't considering too, like replacing the entire window or putting on a new storm. We talked for about 15 minutes on all the options.

In the end, I bought a double strength pane of glass. Standard, single pane glass is about 1/16th of an inch thick. As you might guess, DS glass is 1/8th of an inch thick, so less likely to break, although twice as heavy. When I asked him how much for the 8" by 12" piece of glass, it came to $2.65. I'd say it wasn't even worth the time it took him to tell me about my options. On the upside though, I'll be going to him in the future, as I can't get DS glass from my hardware store.