I own an older house, built in 1906, in a time when materials were expensive, labor was cheap, and energy was not cheap but less of a focus than it is now. Since I’m a bad combination of a poor grad student and a “sure, I can do that” woodworker, I am steadily working on updating said house. This is the first post in a (hopefully long) series of “what I learned and what I did”. We’ll start with the windows and how I fake-modernized them. A lot of this I will include by reference because there’s a lot of material out there.
First: accessing the window guts. I’m fortunate to have a workshop and enjoy woodworking, which means that for a lot of this I’m planning on “tear out and replace”. One nice thing about older windows is they’re made up of rectangular pieces of wood without a lot of mechanism. So, without further ado:
1) Tear off the inside trim and throw it away. I have “craftsman on the cheap” trim (picture coming soon), which is a simple 1×4 or 1×6 board with decorative smaller boards at the corners. Simple, painted five billion times, and each to replace – rip ‘er out.
2) Tear off the inside stops, which are the pieces of molding trapping the lower sash in the window. As with the interior molding they were painted over too many times, and in many cases they were splintering anyway.
3) Remove the lower sashes and take ‘em out to the garage.
4) Pull the parting stop, which is the strip between the lower and upper pane. As with the rest of the molding, this tends to destroy the wood; that’s okay.
5) Pull the upper sashes and take ‘em away.
So now I have access to what is effectively the window carcass; the sashes are out of the way and I can see the weight pockets to each side as well. I used a heat gun to strip any cracked and peeling paint, especially along the bottom of the window where water collects.
Now things get clever. This is a lot of effort to go through to simply repaint the windows; I’m planning on weatherstripping the heck out of them as well. So once I have the frames stripped, primed, and painted, here’s the plan:
1) Cut new parting stops. It’s a simple 1/2″ x 3/4″ profile, which is trivial to do on the table saw. Instead of weatherstripping the sash sides (which would be tough), I’m installing nylon pile on the stops. I’ll cut a groove in the front of the stop the height of the lower sash (from the bottom), and on the back of the stop the height of the upper sash; these grooves will hold the pile weatherstripping and seal tightly to the sashes. With this, I don’t need to worry about side-to-side slop and clearance. We’ll see if it works.
2) Cut new inside stops; I’m resawing ‘em out of 8/4 poplar because I’m cheap. Now that I think about it, I could find and use 3/8 MDF for the painted windows. Ah, well, I had the poplar.
3) Groove the sashes for weatherstripping. While the sides are taken care of by the parting stops, I still need to do the top, bottom, and meeting rail (where the two sashes overlap). I’m planning to do this on the tablesaw with a vertical fence, and use tube weatherstripping to seal.
4) Insulate the weight pockets. They’re bare to the outside wall, which means completely uninsulated. I think I have room to install 1″ foam board panels inside while still having room for the weights; if so, I’ll then seal the edges with spray foam. 1″ is not as good as densepack cellulose, but it’s better than nothing.
5) Reinstall the sashes and stops. All hail the air nailer.
6) Cut, paint, and install the inner molding. For cost efficiency, I plan to use MDF on anything that’s low wear and painted, which means “anything except the sill”. MDF is like recycled paper, so it’s even somewhat environmentally conscious!
Pictures and diagrams to come!