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.