Making windows

OK, so I know how to make brick. I can cut beams and joists. How do you make windows? Haha, Mr. Google, is there nothing you can't tell me? Here's a nice link, [taken from a house blog not unlike my own: post 1 and post 2] the short answer being pretty much what I expected: with a table saw, a router, a mortiser, and a tenon jig. I'll bet you could fake the mortise-and-tenon stuff without specialized tools, too.

In addition to the longer-term pipe dream of building my own 19th century house from scratch, though, I had the epiphany that these 4'x8' classic double-hung windows that have such a poor R value could easily be fixed the same way Hungarians do it in older buildings (and this is surely the same in older buildings elsewhere in Europe) - simply provide a second layer of casement windows on the interior of the window. In fact, with a bar 5 or 6 feet from the bottom of the window, you could have a tilting horizontal casement window at the top that could let in a nice breeze without scattering your papers on the floor and being proof against minor rain, while still leaving the larger bottom part for opening in full when you want to lean out.

I've tried to find a picture of these interior casement windows, with no luck. I don't even have any that I took myself. Just picture it in your mind, and trust me: it would be the perfect modification for the windows in this house.

Interior insulated shutters

From SFgate (the paper in San Francisco), of all places, we have an interesting 2008 article about interior insulated shutters. See, windows that are 4'x8' and consist of a single pane of glass have an R value of roughly negative a million, meaning that they actively suck heat energy into the icy blackness of space.

Seriously - if they're puttied and caulked, they're not really that bad. But insulated shutters keep light in at night, too, and the benefit is that they don't affect the outside appearance of the windows, which is really an important issue if you have traditional windows. For me, anyway.

There's a whole long list of energy conservation measures here, including many ways to improve the insulation values of windows. Most of them are lower in priority for me than sealing up the myriad holes in the basement (including several windows that are inexpertly boarded up), but the shutter thing is really intriguing. I have two big pieces of Styrofoam left over from the carriage house family room floor that are serving as insulation right now in my office, but it's not a particularly permanent solution.

Back carriage house door

So towards the end of the summer (August 25), we did some yard work, and one of the things my wife volunteered for, as the only not-yet-sensitive individual in the family, was to carefully extricate some of the old poison ivy from the back door in the carriage house. The ivy itself was dead (I killed it quick upon arrival in 2009) but the dead vines still contain urushiol, and I typically break out just from leaf debris falling on my head.

Well, when the door was freed of its vines and associated leaf mold, we discovered a sad fact: the threshold and lower frame of the door had at some point been eaten by termites. The threshold was entirely gone, leaving a surprising amount of space open under the door once I removed the humus.

This was bad. This is a flashing neon sign saying, "Mice welcome here." Not to mention drafts.

Since we don't really need three doors on the east wall of the carriage house, I figured I'd frame it in and replace it with a window, like the window on the south end of the west wall. That window is pretty cool. So I went and bought a window of massive dimensions (34"x56", only something like $190 at Menard's) and ... there it sat for a while. There was so much other winterization to do, and glazing a window for my daughter's room, and a drain broke in the big house and had to be replaced, and, well, it was November before I knew it.

On November 13, I had had enough, and poured the footer for the new bit of frame wall. It took me maybe an hour. Part of the reason I took so long to get started, to be honest, is that the bottom of this footer area wasn't level, and there was a big gap at the left end of the plywood form. Pretty stupid reason. I ended up taking a bit of brick and two small marble rocks from the garden and placing them there, and just pouring the concrete over them. It worked great and looks great, so ... there's a trick you can use if you're ever in a similar situation.

Well, but I'd opened that door, and as you can see, the frame was no longer really attached to the building. I couldn't close the door again. I did the best I could and stacked some junk against the inside, and let the concrete cure for, um, well, the camera must be lying when it says I left it like that for six days. Right?

On November 19th, the paying work subsided to the point where I couldn't ignore this any further, and so I started removal of the door and frame. I wanted to keep the round wood at the top, and the top of the frame was also still solid, so I basically wanted to cut 2x8s out of the floor framing in the big house basement (long story - but the short version is, the previous owner had some odd ideas about the parts of houses that could be rendered habitable, so I have a great deal of framing lumber for these projects) and fashion a new frame in the shape of a U.

The process of cleaning the old door out yielded a great deal of rubble, and was done by about 1 in the afternoon (I had only started around noon), at which point I realized I had no drill bit for my bottom frame part, which I wanted to bolt into those anchor bolts you see here. (Doesn't that footer look pretty good? I'm feeling like maybe I know what I'm doing, a little, with concrete.)

So I left the house with a big hole in it, to the amusement of the neighbors, and went to Menard's for a drill bit and Taco Bell for lunch (and kind of regretted the latter, although the Wodehouse accompaniment was top-notch, don't you know, old top). Then came the taxi work for the afternoon, and so it was four o'clock by the time I got back to work. Did you know the sun is setting at about five these days? This was frustrating.

But by 7:30, the frame didn't look half bad! It took this long because no matter how carefully you measure a distance in a 130-year-old brick house, the wood you cut will still be wrong. Note the presence of the maul. This frame will be there for another fifty or a hundred years, easy - the middle crossbar there was about 3/16" too big. Rather than cut it again, I pounded the darn thing into place, with the added benefit that the sides of the frame will not drift on the wall. (The original builders didn't nail the sides to the wall, so I didn't either.)

I put a 2x4 at the top of the window to give me something to nail the window to - and then I realized that it was pretty handy for holding the round top of the old door up to the top of the opening. 8 PM at this point, and I had paying work to do - but I still had a gaping hole in the side of the carriage house, and the nights are getting pretty chilly.

I popped the window in, which took about ten minutes at this point (for once, something fit as measured) - here it is on the inside, showing how much plaster work is going to be necessary.

Then I cut a piece of plywood to cover up the open part on the bottom, and worked on paying work into the wee hours, and slept the sleep of the just.

On the outside on the 21st, I framed around the window with 1x2s and painted the whole thing with my oil-based white primer. And that's as far as I've gotten - I want to put an exterior outlet there (it will be the first on the whole property) before framing in and plastering over the whole thing.

But here's a picture of the outside, which save a little more caulk and the topcoat (which at this week's temperatures is looking like it will have to wait for spring) is essentially done. I get a little frisson of pride every time I see it, which is several times a day. (It does make the kitchen window above it look even more ragged in contrast, though.)

Remember that first window?

My first window removal, June 11, 2009. I finally trimmed and painted it, May 13, 2010.

Progress!

The bathroom window! Trim! Paint!

According to my notes and project documentation (digital cameras timestamp your pictures - who knew?), it was August 31 when I started the replacement of the bathroom window. The sill was a sodden mess of humus, obviously not having been maintained for decades - and north-facing, so never getting properly dry. Here you see the initial state immediately after removal of the remainder of the existing sashes (they had no glass in them when I bought the place - just some exterior Visqueen, sigh). I doused the whole thing in bleach and dried it with the heat gun; it smelled like wet dog.

I scraped off everything spongy, leaving a 1.5-inch-deep cavity under the inside sill which I filled with urethane foam. I painted the outside sill with a Zinsser fixative-slash-primer - I plain love everything Zinsser makes, really a better life through chemistry kind of company!

The result was something pretty sturdy for the next few years; the wood that remained was still pretty solid. Here you see that intermediate stage after about three coats of that primer. It's thin stuff that soaks into the substrate and makes a solid surface. I love it.

That's the view from the outside before any paint was applied (I don't think you've seen the north face of the carriage house yet, and that's the top of the outhouse, which is built exactly like a brick outhouse). Once this much was done, I filled in the cavities with caulk and painted the heck out of it; two coats of my oil-based exterior trim paint. The result looked like it hadn't been neglected since the Nixon Administration, so I figured it was time to pop in the window.

Then I went into hibernation.

Well, fast-forward to now. Unfortunately, I got a little out of the habit of photographing everything, and it appears I didn't take a picture of the untrimmed interior - suffice it to say it had yellow foam sticking out, and you can see what the interior trim looked like. My wife put down the imperial foot, and beautification thus became the order of the day. Fortunately, the paying work had come to an abrupt halt on April 16th, for the usual lack of any discernible reason (the translation industry acts seasonal - but scaled to a year from some other planet, perhaps one in a binary system without a stable orbit). The upshot: I had both motivation and time. It was time to trim.

Trimming was complicated by the fact that the window was actually an inch too narrow for its frame (I didn't want to spring the extra $100 for a custom size for one lousy inch). So instead of a simple quarter-round trim on the edges of the pocket window replacement, I used 1x1s left over from the roof job last summer. You can see here that the trim paint had to be stripped, too - like all the trim in the carriage house apartment, it's latex applied on top of oil. Sigh. Without primer, of course, so it just peels off. Here you see it peeled off.

After much heat-gunning, the oil coat underneath was also removed (well, mostly), and the fully-trimmed window is now ready for painting. An unfortunate lens artifact makes it look like the carriage house is a lot less square than it actually is; the window does not actually bulge like this in real life.

Here you can also see the blue plastic wall tiles of the bathroom. A much later followup job will be to take those off, scrape their glue, and paint the entire wall with a resilient bathroom-appropriate paint. They're pretty horrendous.

Zinsser 1-2-3 primer sticks to anything, including the residual oil paint left on this trim, and since I'm using an interior latex, priming is important. Priming also shows us just how many nail holes have been knocked into this window over the decades; so I caulked them all up and laid down a thin bead along all the seams of the trim as well.

The next day, the topcoat - et voilà! A lovely trimmed window just like Mama used to make. Now I only have one window (the kitchen window) to replace, and a total of four to trim and paint; I've started stripping the paint on the bedroom window this week.

This window is literally so nice it gives me a thrill to look at it, even a week later.

Bathroom window

The bathroom window has been almost easy - except for one thing. Here, the sill plate really is rotten. Here's the sill just after I've removed the sashes (last week).

I scraped all the spongy rotten wood away, doused it all in bleach to kill whatever was growing in there, and painted the entire thing with Zinsser Peel Stop primer.

Peel Stop is kind of cool stuff. It smells just like Elmer's Glue, and it soaks into peeling substrate and binds it. They do warn (duh) that this is no substitute for proper surface preparation, and I'm sure this is true, but since proper surface prep in this case would be replacement of the sill plate - a project I can't afford to repeat this fall - this approach will have to do. Ask me again in a year or two how important that surface preparation was.

Note that there are three levels of sill plate. The outer one is rotten on top, but the rot has eaten into the gap between the outer plate and the middle one that is probably the sill plate proper - by "eaten in" I mean there wasn't shelf fungus on it yet, but there was white mold with hyphae, and it had eaten a spongy cave about an inch into the wood under there. I filled it with urethane foam (yes, it is Great Stuff), cut it roughly flush, and painted over the entire thing.

The result, especially after caulking in some of the pits on the upper surface of the sill plate and painting over that, looks surprisingly functional. This is an oil-based glossy enamel; I'm using it on all the external trim. I want something that will shed water and last years. We'll see how well this lasts.

The window itself is a charming one; note that it has the same arch over it that the doors do. I assume that when the carriage house was originally built, this may have been the only actual window; the others were haymow doors, or cut later (that's my theory).

This picture also shows the roof of the outhouse. I might reshingle it, just to match, but since this is the only roof on the property I don't really care about, its priority is rather low. A bit of paint on the trim wouldn't hurt, though. Perhaps this will be an October project, weather permitting.

Anyway, I'll post a finished picture of the bathroom window after installation; right now, the final coat of paint is drying.

Front windows

I think I mentioned I finally finished the front windows last week. No trim, of course (that's not a functional to-do point), but they're tight and they work.

These windows, what with the need to rebuild the sill and reset the bricks under the old sill plate, really set me back longer than I had wanted. I wanted to have the heat under control during the month of August. But life does these things to us.

The current plan would have to be this:

1. Carriage house electrical work


• Replace stolen ground wire outside
• Baseboard heaters
• Entryway lighting
• Second switch for garage area overhead lighting
• Troubleshoot outlets in kitchen (none work)
• Overhead light for washer/dryer area
• Separate circuit for bedroom to permit use of air conditioner


2. Carriage house livability


• Garage area livability
• Remove superfluous fiberglass insulation from the ceiling and around heating ducts (we're going to heat the garage area, after all; we're living in it)
• Drywall the south wall where the garage door used to be
• Caulk everywhere (a lot is done; more to be done)
• Some plaster patching
• More paint, aye


• Bathroom
• Attach and plumb vanity
• Touch up paint on walls and paint the trim


• Windows
• Finish bathroom window
• Kitchen window
• Interior trim on all windows


3. Big house


• Roof work proceeding apace
• Upstairs bathroom plumbing
• Cleaning
• Winterization, a lengthy process
• Heat
• Electrical systems: oh the humanity!

Dammit, Jim, I'm a bricklayer, not a surgeon!

As I mentioned last time, the bricks were loose under the front window. So I mixed up way more mortar than I needed (well, I started with too much water, I think) and set to work.

Here are the tools I ended up using the most. You're actually supposed to use a big trowel (which you can see in my mortar bucket up there) but I found it far too ungainly. I'm sure if I were bricking up a wall of 10,000 bricks I'd appreciate being able to slap the mortar onto each one with a big trowel, but I'm just doing detail work here, and I found the smaller one much easier. The slightly S-shaped thing is a jointing tool, used for pushing mortar between bricks and for shaping the joint after the mortar has gotten "thumbprint hard".
I started at the left, and worked right. You can see this, to a certain extent, in the regularity of the mortar. It turns out that working with mortar is hard. My wife said, "I told you it was going to be hard!" To which I answered, "I told you it was going to be possible!" And it was, both.

The finished product, though, doesn't look half bad. It's not terribly straight, but - this is the important point - today, these bricks are no longer falling out. My next brickwork will be better, and this will be basically invisible, once the windowsill is in place.

What I learned about masonry: mortar dries fast. Also, bricks soak in moisture like little, heavy, clay sponges. I used my detergent bottle to squirt water on continually, but a sprayer would be better. I also kept adding water to my mortar in the bucket. It all hardened up fine, so this must have been OK.

You're supposed to put your mortar onto the bottom of the brick, and the end of the brick which will butt up against the last brick placed. When I tried this, the mortar fell off. So instead, I put the mortar onto the bottom, put the brick into place as quickly as possible, then sort of post-tuck-pointed the mortar between the bricks on the sides. Since the bricks are pretty solid today, this must have been OK.

Also, these bricks are actually too close together (not my fault, they're laid that way; I was just putting them back where they were). There were gaps of only about 1/8", instead of 3/8", which is the minimum jointing tool size, thus presumably the minimum normal gap between bricks. Anyway, this made it tough to get any mortar into the gaps.

So my first bricklaying endeavor seems to be at least good enough: the bricks aren't falling out. I call that a success.

I don't think it's supposed to do that

So I started poking into the front window sills a little. After we tore out the sill, we found that it was leveled by inserting chunks of brick under it, then caking lots of mortar over the whole thing. Well, it worked for a long time, so I'm not arguing.

So I bought this vinyl windowsill profile to put in there, and decided to chip out the mortar to make room for it. It was kind of loose, though.
By the time I got done cleaning out loose mortar, the top row of bricks was out. So I think that probably needs to be fixed...

Aside on the front window

So for the last week, House work has again come to a screeching halt, having been replaced by my tech hat. My wife will be teaching three classes this fall at the local colleges, and so it was the mandate that her old laptop, whose cooling fan has been making very worrisome noises lately, be phased out, while one of the other family laptops (the one normally used for Lego video games and YouTube searches for fan-made Transformers knock-offs) be co-opted, a new user created on it, and the latest in required software (meaning Office 2007, LaTeX, and the like) installed.

All of this duly complete, I got excited about Office 2007, installed it on my own laptop without thinking, and immediately realized that (1) Microsoft obviously didn't consider my macro collection important, deleting it without a trace, and (2) Word 2007 isn't compatible with TRADOS 7, my translation tool, and the budget can't afford an upgrade to TRADOS 7, and my old installation media for Word 2003 are mysteriously absent.

Havoc ensued. Fortunately, translation work was in a lull. So I did something I've wanted to do for a while now; I wrote a little Python COM object script that sits between Word and TRADOS and by-God forces compatibility by massaging the text segments on the Clipboard as they fly past. The jaw-droppingly amazing thing is that it actually worked, and only took about four hours to write. (Python just makes that stuff so ... not easy. Possible.) Oh, my goodness, but I have plans for that little object. But this is the wrong venue for that; I'm just explaining why no building has happened.

Except I tore the front plank off the post between the front windows. This "post" is actually a roughly square structure consisting of one-inch planks, and it's hollow, providing a place to hang the counterweights for the old window.

The problem is that it's none too stable, and doesn't really provide enough support for the pocket replacement windows, so I'm going to shore it up with some small pieces of 2x4 inside the hollow part, then insulate the entire thing with foam before closing it all back up and installing the windows for real. This has to happen on the sides of each window, too. And of course I still haven't addressed the fact that my dad and I ripped out the old sill. So the windows are more complicated.

Here's a picture of the counterweights themselves, just for historical reasons. Kind of neat; I'm keeping the weights.

So after pulling this plank out, so far I've left it hanging. My wife asked, "Um, so why did you pull out the middle of the window again?" So I started to tell her about the 27 8x10 color glossy photographs with circles and arrows on the back of each one in four-part harmony, and she stopped me right there and said, "Kid," she said, "Just put it all back together someday, OK?"

I live to serve.

About those front windows...

I've been quiet! I had a crushingly underestimated job, which is good I guess - I'll be able to hire some people to do the two still-leaking sections of the roof on the big house. Also, a need for orthodontia is making itself known among our younger generation. These things never cease. But I still hate running three days past deadline and not actually knowing how long it'll take to finish up.

But we're here to talk about my house, right?

It turns out that somehow, despite repeated (and confirmed) measurement, the front windows for the carriage house were simply 1/8" too big for the frame, a situation which I still can't rationally explain. Reasoning, however, that taking the inside sill plate off would allow me to insert the windows straight in, instead of tilting them, I took the plate off -- and they were still too big.

Then my dad came over on Wednesday. I had been up until 4:30 AM working on some Italian quality control procedures for Alcoa (I earn the money with technical translation, if you were wondering) and so I was none too coherent, but we fixed the bathtub drain, which I'll post about separately, and I showed him the front windows.

Well. As we remember from the bathroom episode, my dad likes a challenge, and his creativity is only helped by the fact that here, he doesn't have to clean up after destroying things. It's liberating to watch him. The upshot: the windows don't actually have sills any more; we're going to have to come up with something different, like a really skinny sill or possibly a thinner plank across the top to make room for a thicker sill down below. Ah well.

At least I can get some air and light into the front room now. These look pretty decent, don't they? Better than the plywood, anyway - they're just tacked in place right now until we can replace the sills, though.

The neat thing is that the upper sash on the left side still had its counterweights intact! Sixty-year-old knotted ropes and all. I figure this was only possible because it was painted shut and therefore hadn't been moved in a very long time.

Also, fun fact: the spacing for the sill consists of chunks of brick simply laid in place to support the sill where the builder wanted it. I didn't take pictures yet, and don't want to take the window out just now to show you, but I found that pretty cool.

Blocked at every turn

Thinking to set one of the new front windows into the frame in place of the board, I unwrapped it and cleared out what remained of the old top sash - only to find that the sill has warped a little, and the right edge of the window is about 1/8" too big to fit into the frame. So I'll have to plane the sill down to get that window in. Disappointing, but I'm still pumped about how nice it's going to look.

Paint!

OK, I painted the frame of Window 2. I was excited to realize that oil-based paint smells like paint, bringing back memories of childhood, weirdly. Nothing very specific, just impressions. Very interesting.

From outside, it looks fantastic. I'm really getting kind of excited to see what the overall carriage house is going to look like after the trim is done.

Methylene chloride

During the window prep, I decided to try out my new paint stripper, which like most paint strippers is based on methylene chloride. It comes in a metal can with a plastic spray bottle, so I poured some over into the spray bottle and sprayed some onto the window frame.

Nothing came out.

Ah - you have to turn the nozzle! I did so, and a spray of methylene chloride splashed back off the window onto my hand and forehead (fortunately, I wear glasses).

I have never actually experienced chemical burns; now I know why they call it that. It was basically like a hundred little fire ants on my forehead. Luckily, my head fits well under the new kitchen faucet.

There was no permanent damage, except to my pride, which heals quickly. And yes, I found the rubber gloves with great alacrity, and followed the instructions from that point on.

Oh, the paint! Yeah, it stripped it pretty well. I want to strip it because the top layer, a white paint that's probably latex, peels right off the layer below, which is ... I don't know what it is. Probably lead, except it's in suspiciously good condition for paint that would have to be over thirty years old. It's just that I can't imagine this property having ever even heard a rumor of lead remediaton. Ha! It is to laugh!

But clearly I need to repaint the window frames, so it makes sense to me to get everything off them first that will come off easily. Besides, it was a good excuse to try out a new toy, even if it's just a chemical.

Window 2 prepped

This one's on the east side, one of the 28"x54" ones. It had no glass left and was Visqueen-and-fiberglassed up, so it is the logical next window to get something with a screen in it.

Since it's on the east and gets more shade, the weatherproofing is in OK shape; I'm not even going to replace the caulk, as it honestly seems fine for now. I've learned from experience in one respect, though: I'm going to paint the frame before putting the window it. Granted, that was the plan with the other one before I got panicky about the coming storm (which naturally failed to materialize), but this time I mean it. So tomorrow I'll paint, then install the window.

Also on tomorrow's agenda is to finish prepping the bathtub wall and get the faucet reinstalled. That's probably enough for one day.

On the front windows: I just went ahead and ordered some special-sized 30"x54" windows. What the heck, it's just money. What decided me was the sudden realization that I would not only have to build a new center post, but also add four inches of sill. That seemed kinda stupid. And worth a hundred bucks to avoid. And as long as I was special ordering, I went ahead and got a little grill put into the windows. They'll be in front, so that'll look pretty slick, I think.

Then paint the rest of the trim (window frames and door frames) and the carriage house will look utterly charming.

Anyway, that was today. Till tomorrow!

Window 1 installed

Well, I don't know how competently it's installed, but the window is installed. (Scattered thunderstorms coming, so I didn't want the window, propped in the frame, to blow in and shatter.)

I'm not entirely convinced I was doing the right thing with the shims, but the window is square, it's against the blind stop, it still opens, and it feels quite solid, so it can't be all that bad. Tomorrow I'm going to finish the hot water plumbing, and look at the front windows now that I am an experienced window installer.

In the meantime, I'm going to take advantage of the fact that I'm caught up with the paying work for the first time since April, and I am going to the movies, see if I don't!

Caulking II: masking tape for the win!

Oh yeah, masking tape makes things way easier. Ignoring the pleasant light rain, I caulked the left side of the window in about ten minutes, a couple of feet at a time. Since I could get sloppy on the edge, tooling the bead was easy.

When I finished, I carefully stripped away the tape, and there you go -- a pretty decent bead!

So now you know. And so do I.

By the way: remove the masking tape before the caulk sets, even though that seems a little counterintuitive. If you don't, your weird sloppy bead will be there forever (or you'll have to cut it off with a utility knife). The point being, it won't be what you want.

Caulking

Now that the window frame is open and easy to get to from inside, I thought it would be appropriate to fix it up a little, which brings us to caulking.

Did I hear somebody ask why caulk?

Here's a shot of the daylight between that very frame and the wall it's installed in. I removed the trim on the left side of the window just so I could see the structure here; there's nothing to insulate, but that crack is ... well, today it's 80° and sunny, and I can remove an entire window and think nothing of it. But come January, when it's -10°F and the wind is whistling through that crack, well, the term "unheatable" comes to mind. The carriage house is actually pretty heatable -- except for its, you know, lack of windows, but this is just a warmup for the big house.

So I bought "Ultimate Hybrid Sealant and Adhesive", a vinyl-based caulk. Says it's UV-resistant and can adhere even to wet surfaces, and it has a convenient cap on the tip, so I figured, let's give it a shot. I've done a lot of caulking, but it actually appears as though I've never done it right. I say this because in the instructions for installing this window, I saw the term "tool the caulk". Those of you who have actual non-hilljack building experience will laugh at this point, but ... I just never considered that it might be necessary to work the caulk after squirting it out of the tube. It's logical, now that I've thought about it; caulk is thick stuff (this vinyl caulk is exactly like lanolin; those of you who have had babies will know what I mean) and it doesn't really go into the crack very well unless you push it in by force.

So, lacking a better alternative, I did a test run, and used my finger to tool the caulk. It wasn't easy, and it looks pretty amateur. I mean, it's functional, and it'll keep the air out, and from the ground it looks fine, and especially once I paint the wooden frame it'll be nearly unnoticeable to anybody but me, but I know it could be prettier.

So ... back to Google. And here I found some chatter with people who have some experience. Turns out they use their fingers, too. I'm reassured. But ... they also use masking tape to get an edge! Another suggestion is to use a plastic spoon dipped in mineral spirits, for vinyl caulk, because it's quite sticky (which I noticed) and thus hard to tool without smearing it all over.

I don't have mineral spirits (I know I bought some, but I must have left it in the Lowe's cart or something, because it sure didn't make it inside), but I do have masking tape.

So for today's caulking, I'm ready. Here's the tape in place. Now I'm going to do some paying work, then do some more caulking. Finally, I'll end the day with more plumbing (the hot water here in the carriage house still hasn't been replaced) and maybe I'll mop some more ceilings. I'm almost done with the kitchen. It'll still need paint, but at least I'll know there's no grime under the paint. Not under my coat, anyway.

Update: Hmm. I hear thunder, so perhaps there will be no caulking today after all.

How to remove a storm window

OK, so remember how I said the storm window had to be removed from the outside? It's easy.

Step 1: put ladder on side of carriage house.

Step 2: climb up ladder until head is about a foot below the bottom of the window.

Step 3: freeze in sheer terror.

Step 3a: imagine the Latino neighbors looking at the stupid gringo on the ladder and laughing.

Step 3b: it doesn't help.

Step 3c: imagine the redneck neighbors looking at the stupid dandy on the ladder.

Step 3d: shut up, it's still not helping.

Step 4: after ten minutes, admit defeat. Go back inside the carriage house and figure out how to remove the storm window from the inside, standing on the floor as God intended.

See how it's held on with these strips? Remove those, and ease the window in through the frame.

Step 5: success.

Step 6: scrape old paint until it gets boring, then sit down to blog the experience, with a frosty, refreshing Coca-Cola from your own refrigerator.

I can only imagine that not getting scared on the ladder is a matter of practice. I used to be very wary on stepladders, but got used to that. It's not the height -- I can lean out the same window over the same precipice and laugh. It's the vivid mental image of how much it would hurt if the ladder, an implement which I fundamentally do not trust, would fall down.

Perhaps scaffolding is the answer. If it looked more stable, that would be good enough. But I have to figure out something; these eaves really need paint. I guess I could buy a lift truck or a cherry picker. I always wanted a cherry picker anyway. Those look fun. Too bad they cost way more than my house(s).

Hmm. Or not: Ebay lists a 300 lb rated lift platform with extending stabilizers for only $2300 buy-now price. That's pretty darned tempting. This house is really high.

How to remove a double-hung window

I took the plunge, and bought my first window "pocket replacement" as part of my daily Lowe's spend. But before you put a window in, first you gotta take one out. Total time: about 20 minutes. So easy, a child could do it! It was made somewhat less stressful by my selection of a window that has no glass remaining in it, but it would have gone just as easily with a more breakable window.

Here is our first victim in its native environment. Crikey, he's a big one, and he's not happy to see me!

Here's the structure of this window. On the far inside, there is a strip of wood about a quarter inch thick and maybe two wide. It holds the lower sash in place. (A "sash" is the part of the window that moves. There are two of them, even if one can't move.) So first, we free the lower sash by removing those strips. There is one on each side, and one on top; the ones on the sides come out first.

These are our tools. The pry bar thing is a molding remover. The hammer is a hammer.

After the side strip is removed, see how the sash is just hanging there? Now do the same on the other side. Be careful to hold the sash in place as you finish the other side, then carefully lift the sash out. Assuming your sash still has glass in it, anyway. Mine didn't.

Here's the molding remover in action on the top strip. None of this required any exertion at all, by the way. It all comes out easily, even after ninety years and God knows how many coats of paint.

The top sash is held in place, and separated from the bottom sash, by a square strip maybe half an inch on a side. So next we remove that.

Except -- oops -- the sash actually holds it in place. Since nothing yet had required any exertion or destructive force at all, I considered the situation carefully. Clearly things weren't meant to be done in this order...

And sure enough, the square strip on the right side comes out easily.

After it's removed, this pin still holds the top sash in place. This is what the pin looks like after I pulled it out with a pair of pliers (not shown) -- it's spring loaded and moves easily, after ninety years. Unless these windows were replaced sometime after the construction of the carriage house in 1920, that is. But they look original.

When the top sash is removed, there's one more strip of wood. Don't take that out. It's the blind stop, and it holds the replacement window it. You can't take it out anyway, because it's not just a strip on the frame, it's integral to the frame. Yes, I found this out the hard way, but the bit I split off was easy to nail back in place, and after I discovered its integrality, I checked the instructions for installing the new window. When all else fails, read the instructions. At any rate, the blind stop is important, so leave it.

And so we're done, and it was all so easy the aloe vera didn't need to be moved. My only disappointment is that the storm window can't be removed from inside; I'll have to get on the ladder to get it off. But that's all right, because it all needs paint out there anyway.

The newly freed window frame, now sans aloe vera to facilitate insertion of the new window.

And here's the window's future, still in shrink wrap. That will be a topic for another day, probably tomorrow after delivery of the fridge.

I really should have been doing plumbing today, but the prospect of using my new molding remover to take out the window sounded like too much fun.