Sunday, February 15, 2009

New upstairs windows

In the midst of all the plumbing repair last month, the window installer called and said, "hey, I'll be out next week to install the new windows". Great. Not only do I get to learn the ins and outs of plumbing, I get to finish windows! How can one girl get so lucky? But in my heart-of-hearts, I knew this was a good thing. You see, the windows that were here in the bunkhouse were old. Not 1980's old, not 1970's old. But O.L.D. The glass was rippling, the screens were custom made and black-black-black. The screens were so bad that the one winter I took them all down they warped over the season and I had to hammer them back in for the spring. Lesson learned, don't take these out, ever. When the wind blew outside, the north side bedrooms would be 40F inside and the south side windows would be 90F. It would be the normal 68F in the hallway where the thermostat is located, but everyone else was uncomfortable. I requested all new windows on property, but because of the economic situation tourism will be in this coming summer, only half of the windows were slated for replacement. And since heat rises and the downstairs windows are boarded over, this left the upstairs windows available for upgrades. I had to keep the historical aspects the same. They needed to look the same, act the same but preform much better. The new house has all casement windows for insulative purposes (and we want tax credits for energy efficiency) but I need something historical to preserve our historical integrity. And I found six-light, sliding windows from Jeld-Wen. Aluminum exterior in historic green with a wood interior. An antique gold paint interior for the windows, with an antique walnut stain for the trim. Here are the old windows in one of the upstairs bathrooms First the trim was removed Then the new sexy windows were installed What I will miss the most is the ultra cool holding mechanisms for the old windows. The old pull pin with holes drilled into the sills so they would stay up. Not that they did, I would have to release the top portion of the window and let that one down, cause most of the pins stopped holding the bottom windows up. And since heat rises, it made sense to drop the top window. Bye-bye pins, hello sexy levers. These babies suit a dual purpose: not only to they allow me to wash the outside of the windows from get this.... the inside, they allow me to pull the whole window pane out. Fan-fuk-ing tastic! My only problem is, it is freezing outside and I need to take the panes out to paint them properly. This will have to wait until spring. I stained the windowsills these past two weeks. You can see their gorgeousness in the following blog posts. I chose an antique walnut that matches the wood walls beautifully. It took me almost 2 weeks to putty, sand, stain, and stain a second time. Twice as long as I thought it would take me. And exhaustive none the less. Most of the toilets are repaired and/or replaced. I still have three to work on. Two are only used in the summer and can wait until spring, and the last one is in the lower bunkhouse men's bathroom. Instead of being secured to the floor, it was gasketed to the waste pipe because unapparent to me, the floor had rotted and they laid vinyl over it to hid it. Lovely, just lovely.

1 comment:

india flint said...

so, what have you done with all that lovely old rippled glass? sounds like treasure to me...
your socks are amazing, by the way!