Windows on the World (or Neighborhood at least!)

When we got this building we'd spent all of 20 minutes in the winter, walking through with penlight in hand because the windows were boarded up.
When we unwrapped this gift, we discovered that the windows themselves were not as well preserved as we had hoped...

Oops!
We had some possible options here:
a) take apart each window and rebuild it (ooh... what about the dry rot in the surround of the windows that announced itself when we were able to lay a finger on the inside around the window frame!)
b) replace the windows with new sashes (but the wood holding the windows up is leaky and soft and new windows without new support would be like putting lipstick on a pig...)
c) strip out the windows to the brick and start from scratch...

Oh! is it C? Can we choose C?

well, we did choose C... and we made a bit of a mess in the process...

We pulled out everything that wasn't a brick and threw it on the ground... then, because the structural brick is so thick, and we added the 2 x4 to the inside of the walls for the added insulation, I had to come up with a new way to hang these new windows.

The new method: make a plywood sleeve the full depth of the wall width and hang it on the studs that we installed for the insulation!
As we built each sleeve, we included the 'stops' in outside edge so that we could slip the new windows in from the inside instead of lifting them from the outside (too heavy and god-forbid-we should-drop-one!).

I want to say something about the windows themselves.

Because our building is in the Historic District... we have a special group of rules to adhere to if the work has to do with the visible part of our structure! Soooo! When we had to replace the windows they had to be EXACTLY like the windows designed for the house when it was originally built... has to be wood- has to be the same number of panes- has to be exactly the same dimensions... we had to negotiate to get energy efficient glass! By the time we found out what kind of windows we were required to order they became $550 each! Ouch! Except for the one that goes in the bathroom which was $990 (because it is tempered).
They arrived! (after about 4 weeks) and moments later... they were installed!

Then we managed to trim out the exterior of each of the windows so that it looked better than when the place was fresh!
Looks great, doesn't it?

The painful part of this was that meeting the materials requirements for the windows tripled the cost of this part of the project... very tough on us penny pinching artist types... the additional $10,000 could have gone a long way!

On the other hand, they do look faboo and will be there for the next 100 years for us to enjoy, piercing the envelope of our private world and filling our universe with light and the sound of all our friends and neighbors.

Snowing in the house!

This post is a quickie... I prepped the site for this part but then just got out of the way!

We decided to 'over insulate' this old lady of a house... with three layers of brick on the ground floor and two layers of brick on the second floor, this house was pretty well insulated by regional standards but...

I'm thinking:

• the cost of energy is not going down...
• My ability to make more money every year may not be going up...
• It is waste-feul to heat and cool that much space thoughtlessly...

so we added an entire 2 by 4 wall around the entire exterior of the building so that we could add another R-17 to the building...

We spend alot of time looking at the different options : fiberglass batts; foam of various kinds; and blown insulation of various kinds and ended up choosing a totally green option...

We are using a cellulose blown in insulation made entirely of recycled material (old news papers... who says there's no good news?) They blow it out of this giant truck
and they run out big hoses that look like giant vacuum cleaner hoses... now this is neat... while one guy is shooting the material against the wall, the other guy is sucking up the stuff that falls down and it gets instantly recycled!

Trent is putting it in here...
and his brother in law is sucking it up here...


It was very much like a rich New England snow at midnight-- everywhere bits were flying, and the silence was deep and comforting...
at the end, because everything is hosed up during the installation, there is very little waste and the material has packed itself around all of the plumbing and the electrical... it looks like this just before we hang the sheetrock...
Suddenly the house has become quiet. It has become softer. It is changing from the construction zone into the home we are visualizing... ooh!

Inviting the World Properly...

When we found our lovely home it had a fairly new Lowes-issue glass door that replaced the original... the first step was to remove that door and all of the jim-crackery that was pushed in around it to make it stick-
until we had a perfectly empty place to start! The problem with this particular project is that you have to be able to begin and end the project in one day- otherwise there's a huge hole in the front of the building... not so good!

One of our neighbors, (Pat Blue), had in her yard sale a 120 year-old door that she had acquired with and eye toward installing it in her house... that never happen so now it gets to live the next phase of it's life attached to our house!

It's resting here, for a moment, before I trim it up to fit in the new opening... Because we added a whole new layer to the inside of the house for all of that wonderful insulation and electricity, we have to create a pocket that now reaches from the outside of the brick face to the inside of the new wall.

I decided to do this with layers of A/C exterior grade plywood as soon I as figured out that even though the walls that I put in the interior of the house were plumb, the brick walls on the exterior of the house were not! By using the plywood I could cut a trapezoid that gave the appearance that both sides were level and true!
This also allowed me to attach the wood to the fairly random places that were allowed for in the brick and the nice and secure places in the new framing.

Next it's all about the chisel! I suppose that there is some new fangled thing that makes a bunch of noise and dust that zips out the insets for hinges and the door hardware but... we did it 'old school' with a mallet and chisel.

This takes a while and has to be done, tested, done again, tested... Kind of like adding salt to the soup! You can always do a little more but you can't take it away once you've done it! So... no stopping for lunch today!

After re-milling the door to match the new opening (the door was previously in a space that was not square and so I had to trim bits off of the sides, top and bottom to make it square again), and with a little help keeping the door vertical, I get to attach the door to the new opening:

If everything is as it should be then the door will 'hang' (without moving) in any position open and will swing smoothly to close with a 'snick' when it reaches the jam...
a little primer, a doorknob, a little molding and some doodads that came off of an antique wardrobe that someone trashed...
and it looks like it was that way from the very beginning! Later, if we can, I'll replace the door mechanisms with some of the antique stuff that I've been collecting... we'll certainly paint the door something fun!

Welcome y'all!