Good morning,
It's Holli, and today I want to play catch-up real quick on where we are with this project. Yesterday, I mentioned that we had already started. I wanted to get this up and going before that happened but there will be plenty of windows so you won't miss anything.
We have removed the downstairs bathroom window, removed the glass, scraped the paint, sanded, filled checks and cracks, used epoxy to rebuild some of the missing wood, blopturped* it, and were ready to prime and paint when disaster struck.
Tom was hanging the sashes in the workroom for the night and they fell, breaking the bottom rail of the top sash. It broke in two places, in the middle of the rail and on the side of the rail where it becomes the tenon going into the mortice.
Luckily, I married a fix-it man and, we also spent the last year amassing tools for his workshop. Tom went to the attic (there is a small bit of leftover lumber from when the house was built up there) and found a nice hunk of yellow pine, which is what the windows are made of, and reproduced the rail in his shop.
The rail has been reproduced now we need to install it. In order to do that one stile has to come off the sash. The sashes are held together with mortise and tenon joints and 1/4" wooden dowels. But it just so happens that we are fresh out of 1/4" wooden dowels and Tom must make his bi-weekly trip to the hardware store.
I would like to stop and say, I realize that not everyone has a workshop full of tools or the skills to rebuild parts of the windows but not every window is going to require such repairs. As a matter of fact, most windows can be repaired without resorting to replacing any parts, this was just one of those accidental cases that required it to make the window last another 100 years. We could have glued and epoxied it back together and the probably had to redo it again in the future. This is a job I would like to get right the first time.
So there you have it. This is where we are. I will get some of the photos up so you can see what we have done to date.
Today we will be removing the upstairs hallway window to begin working on that. Stay tuned!
Holli
*Blopturp = boiled linseed oil, penetrol, turpentine. We will discuss this more in a future post.
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