windows

First coat of stain on the dining room windows.  They already look 1000x better than the plate glass.

Here is a picture of one of Chloe’s windows, after we replaced them with dual-pane windows.  You can also see the initial attempt at stripping the casing with our speedheater.  The futility of doing all of this led to me to find Houck’s Stripping Center, where I would end up taking all of the door and window trim.  If you have a lot to do, dipping & stripping is the way to go!

Semi-stripped trim around new window

These look much better than the old (non) windows.

The new windows reflect the flash a little more than the surrounding trim due to the polyurethane, but in normal light they are a very good match to the existing woodwork.  The windows add a ton of character to the room, which was missing with the sheets of glass.

In order to get an authentic look, we bought stainable, wood Marvin windows. The divided lights at the top of the picture window is a look seen on most of the older homes in Portland. We got the kind with the aluminum exterior, because we wanted to minimize exterior painting maintenance. They look quite good, even from outside. Even though they’re pine, we were able to custom mix stains to get them very close to the existing (fir) woodwork color.

The long wall of the kitchen had been completely reframed by this point.  There was one stud (along the right edge of the plywood) that was untouched.  Every other stud had been moved or replaced to accommodate the new window openings.

Several people have commented on the size of the header.  Yes, a 12″ header may be considered overkill for an opening that’s about 5.5′ across!  However, we had taken down the header that had divided the kitchen from the eating nook, so it was easy to recycle by cutting it to length and reusing it above the new windows.  While it may be excessive, at least we can be confident that it will never, ever sag…

The back windows was complete, and now the rest of the wall was opened up to start the re-framing of the one above the sink.  As a result of moving all the openings,  the plumbing venting had to be re-routed, since it used to go right up through where the new windows were going.

 View from the inside, just before the old window was ripped out.

The old framing was carefully dismantled, and most of it was reused as possible during the rest of the remodel.

Glass sheets removed in preparation for new windows.

Even before closing on the house, we bought these windows from The Rebuilding Center, a great non-profit building material warehouse here in Portland.  They accept donations of surplus or salvageable building materials and sell them at a reasonable price.  The profits go to fund the warehouse and their community programs.  While much of their stock is from 70’s and 80’s, you can occasionally find gems like these old casement windows.

We really thought that they would go well in our kitchen, and we were excited that they were fir, which would match all of our other woodwork.  Our excitement did not adequately reflect the following issues which our spontaneous purchase would set into motion:

Negative #1) The size and shape of these windows would require a complete re-frame of the long (19′) wall of our kitchen.

Negative #2) They required stripping to get rid of the lead paint.  Luckily, we did find a great local place that could do that for us at a reasonable cost (Houck’s Stripping)

Negative #3) Since these casements had no frames, we’d have to build them ourselves.  That ended up taking a LOT of time and a surprising amount of money.

Negative #4) Some of the glass was broken and would have to be replaced.  Julio’s original plan of replacing all the glass with wavy glass didn’t work out too well, because just about every piece broke either when removing it from the old frame (we bought junky old windows at the Rebuilding Center) or when installing it into these windows

Negative #5) Old, single pane windows are nowhere near as energy efficient as new windows, especially when the windows are warped, which makes it difficult to weatherstrip them well.  Eventually, we are going to make some storm windows that we can put up in the winter.

Once the windows, the stripping, the wood, the “new” hinges (we had to buy antique ones at Rejuvenation, and they cost a small fortune), not to mention the dozens of hours of labor, we easily ended up spending about as much as we would have on new windows.  But, they really do look fantastic, and EVERYONE assumes that they are the original windows.  So while there were a lot of negatives, we’re still glad that we did it this way.