The Great Window Project of 2015

Two of the new windows.
The other two reflected in the lower right quadrant will go in the dining room.

Our house will be one hundred years old in 2019, and many of our windows are original. Several times a year I answer a knock and get a new window pitch from a vendor selling window replacements in our older neighborhood.

Until now, we've hesitated: it's a big project after all, and if energy efficiency were not an issue, I would tend to retain rather than replace. However, most are hard to open and some of them have storm windows that make cleaning next to impossible.

Bob is taking a break and admiring his work

A month or so ago we cleaned the aluminum porch windows, which are themselves over fifty years old, and obviously well past their prime. We decided that this year, we would replace four first-story windows and all the porch windows. The four new windows arrived last week and Scott H. began the work earlier this week.

Today Bob started on prepping some of the frames for painting, since the entire porch will need a fresh coat of paint. The old paint is thick and cracked, and Bob decided that he would use a blowtorch to remove the paint. Of course, this is universally considered to be a bad, dangerous idea but common sense didn't prevail in this instance. Perhaps lead paint fumes affect the mind.



The old wood looks pretty good

The fire extinguisher is within reach

Armed with a blowtorch, sander, scraper and fire extinguisher, he began the work a couple of hours ago. I decided to stay inside, in case I need to call 911 for some reason, but he's almost finished now and it looks like he's done fine. The job actually looks quite good, though the scope of the project has been curtailed since the work began. Scott told him jokingly that it would take a year to burn all the paint off ... and that estimate seems fairly accurate. Looks like sanding the wood and painting over it may be "good enough" for all but the boards done today.

We're happy with the look of the new windows. They are very similar to the original ones, and easy to open and close. At about $200 per window, replacing all the old windows seems like a viable plan to execute over the next year.

The smell of burned paint should dissipate soon.