I spent most of the day yesterday milling new window trim. One of the nice things about older windows is that there aren’t a lot of fancy shapes involved; everything was made by hand, and so there were a lot of rectangles involved. And so when I decided to replace the window trim instead of putting on Yet Another Coat Of Paint ™, it was pretty straightforward.
Double-hung windows use three critical pieces of trim: the inside stop, the parting stop, and the outside stop. The inside stop attaches to the inside edge of the window and keeps the inner, lower sash from falling on to your head. It’s typically about 1″ to 1 1/2″ wide and 1/4″ to 3/8″ thick. If you go to a hardware store, you will probably find this simple rectangle will cost about a dollar a foot, which is pretty inexpensive; however, compared to raw lumber, it’s crazy.
As a side digression, lumber is typically priced by the “board foot”, which is the volume of a 12″ x 12″ x 1″ (thick) board. If we do math, the inside stop is… about 1/20 of a board foot per foot. Given that you can get paint-grade lumber for $2/bf, by making my own I’m looking at a) ten cents a foot (or even if you round up a lot, 20 cents) and b) better wood.
I started with some 8/4 (or 2″ thick) poplar, which is an excellent painting wood, and cut down the pieces I needed. Admittedly, this required a bandsaw (or table saw) and planer; but if you already have them making molding is a remarkably zen-like experience. There’s nothing finicky; you’re just cutting one piece out over and over. So after about an hour, I had a stack of molding ready to paint. I even did this nifty 45* chamfer.
The next piece is the parting stop, which keeps the sashes from hitting each other. Like the inside stop, the parting stop is a rectangle – in this case, 1/2″ x 3/4″. That’s even easier to work with than the inside stops, since you take a standard 1-by board and cut it into 1/2″ wide strips. As a note, I originally bought red oak to do this, because I’d heard that oak is rot-resistant; turns out that’s _white_ oak.
Finally, the outside stops I’m leaving in place. You don’t see them often, and so the many layers of paint aren’t as bad.
The takeaway lesson here? There’s two of them. First, once you put enough layers of paint on something, it ends up looking like… you’ve put a lot of layers of paint on it. It’s not that hard to replace the molding and it will look much better without spending a ton on replacing windows. Second, if you have access to a decent woodworking shop, you can do a lot of it yourself in a weekend afternoon.
Up next: weatherstripping the parting stops. I think that I can weatherstrip the stops instead of trying to groove the panes themselves.