windows

So much for the uniqueness of our house  Today I noticed that a house a mere two blocks away and that I’ve passed by thousands of times is basically the same as ours.  Like the other twin, it sits on a flat lot, so it doesn’t give the same “street feel” as ours, meaning it didn’t jump out at us as a copy.  It is very interesting to see how each house has the same basic plan but varies widely in the details.  Both of the twins have single-gabled dormers on the side, while ours has the unusual double-gable.  Since both twins have multi-paned windows, it makes us wonder if ours did, too.  I suspect not, since our remaining original windows in our house were not, but many of our windows were stripped out in the 60’s and replaced with non-opening glass.  8/2009: we found another look-alike.

Front view of twin #2

The windows are very different than ours

Today was much more fulfilling than yesterday.  If you compare the pictures, you’ll see why!

It always takes me awhile to get back in the groove of hauling up all the tools and starting the circus of sawing, shaving, cutting, sanding, shimming and nailing that’s necessary to install door and window trim.  At least a couple of times during the last two days I wished that we had torn down the plaster instead of drywalling over the top.  Which is worse?  Tearing down some plaster, which takes just a little physical labor, or creating a trim nightmare by increasing your wall depth?  What made it so bad is that the drywall is not at a uniform depth, so the depth difference varies from 1/2″ to 3/4″, sometimes along the length of a given piece of casing.  That meant I had to try to cut and sand down a  strip of fir at an angle to try to even things out.  Of the four openings in this room, only the closet door cooperated by needing a constant 1/2″ filler strip.

Next?  Finishing the base trim and filling all the old and new nail holes, a little more sanding and then onto staining.  I also need to buy, finish and install the crown and the little cap trim that sits on top of the base.  I never have any idea what that piece is called.  I will be going to McCoy Millwork to get these pieces, since I couldn’t find anything appropriate at the usual suspects, Mr. Plywood and Home Depot.

I went through the site and realized that we didn’t have any “before” pictures of this room.  I created a new post so you can see what it used to look like.  Don’t be fooled by the walls in the picture.  The white paint over the wallpaper over the cracked plaster photographed really well!

Door now has trim

Side window and first piece of base trim

Closet door and window facing patio

Today I started installing the hybrid of old and new trim.  Most of what are using in this room is the original trim, but the sills and a few other pieces will be new.  Each piece of casing has to be shimmed out by 1/2″ on the jamb side to account for the increased wall depth.  It is a tedious process to put these back together, but it’s worth it to us to be able to adapt the original trim to the “new” room.

Window trim

Close-up of new sill and old casing

New sill

OK, so this has nothing to do with crops, but they do seem like they must have come from aliens. On sunny mornings, this is the sight that greets us. The reflections from the playroom windows upstairs create these three Xs on our neighbor’s house. Chloe likes to run upstairs to open and close the windows, which makes the patterns move around. The only thing that stumps is is why do the windows create these Xs? The windows are just plain squares of glass, so there must be some kind of complex polarizing effect going on here. Can anyone explain this to us?

This weekend we put in 3 (out of 6) new windows and started the trim…

I pulled off all the vertical trim on the exterior and cut new pieces to better camouflage the wood strips I had to put in to make the windows fit better. It took so long (and used more wood), so I’m thinking of skipping this step on the other side. Even if it doesn’t look as clean, it shouldn’t be a big deal once everything is all painted.

Some door and baseboard trim

My formerly clean work space is trashed again. The MDF molding makes an unbelievable, eternally-reproducing pile of sawdust!

Exterior and interior views of new back bedroom windows.  Go to the bottom of the page to see the difference between these and the old aluminum slider.  Also note that the triangular side  windows are gone.

This is what our trim looked like after staining.  We were extremely fortunate that the Minwax Cherry stain on the fir trim and windows was an almost exact match to the stain on our cabinets.  It really helps tie the room together, and it didn’t require any customizing of the stain, like we had to do on the living and dining room windows.

 No more plywood or holes in our kitchen wall!

The frames Julio made for the casement windows.  The windows were not perfectly square and were slightly warped, so it was challenging to make the frames fit them well.

We completed the window and door trim and the wainscotting.  We modeled the wainscotting design to mimic that of the dining room.  We are very fortunate to have McCoy Millwork here in Portland, from which we bought the cove/crown moulding for the tops of the windows and doors.  While not an exact match for the house’s original moulding, it is very similar and adds a strong dose of authenticity to the appearance of our bathroom (and kitchen, too).  You cannot buy trim like this at Home Depot or Lowe’s.

We  purchased a new Milgard window, because the old one was completely falling apart.  While we try to reuse as much as possible, sometimes it’s just not all that practical.  If the old window had had any aesthetic or vintage value, we would have put more effort into saving it.  Since it was a complete mess, we felt better about installing a new, energy efficient Marvin window.  We used Marvins for all our downstairs replacement windows, since the wood interior trim goes very well with our house.  The no-maintenance aluminum exteriors actually look quite good and will hold up well over time.