Muuuuch Better

It started raining Friday afternoon and hasn’t really stopped but for a few hours here and there. The longest stretch of dry weather was Saturday during the day from about 10 to 4. That’s when I decided to reside the back wall of the bathroom and put in the new window. The only trouble was, that it took me until about 5:30 to finish up.

It wasn’t too bad, really. Around 1:00 the wind really picked up and you could smell rain in the air. The first couple of hours were spent getting things set up, removing the old windows, and starting to remove the old siding. To refresh your memory, I wanted to go from 2 big, double hung windows, down to one small stained glass, single sash window. After I removed the two big windows I found “T Petch” written in pencil on the back side of one of the jambs. This confirmed my suspicion that the windows were original to the 1895 construction, but they were moved during the 1920s apartment cut-up phase. Thomas Petch and his wife were divorced in the teens and he no longer owned the house after that, so the windows must have been from 1895.

I decided to remove and replace siding as I go, rather than remove everything and then start rebuilding. My fear was that I would have a big, gaping hole in the side of the house and then it would start to pour. That didn’t happen, but, as I said, I did have to work in a light rain for the last hour and a half or so. It was those big, widely spaced rain drops you get on the leading edge of a big storm. And it was a big storm. It just poured hard from about 6:00 Saturday evening until early Sunday morning.

There was a Christmas Truck Parade Saturday evening and the people in the parade just got soaked. At this point, you’re probably asking, “What is a Christmas Truck Parade”. Well, it’s pretty much what it sounds like. Remember, this is a small logging town, and people make do with what they have. A lot of the logging trucks, and other kinds of large commercial vehicles are decorated to the hilt by their owners and they drive through town in a long procession.

My friends own a big 1910 Four Square on the parade route and they throw a party every year. I used to think the whole thing was hokey and stupid but now I think it’s kind of fun. The Four Square has a huge front porch and after eating a drinking for a few hours we all pile out on to the porch and hoot and holler as the trucks drive by at 5 miles an hour, each one playing a monotoned rendition of a Jingle Bells on their truck horn. It’s a lot of fun, and after a few glasses of wine it sort of does start to sound like Jingle Bells. {HONK HONK HONK     HONK HONK HONK     HONK HONK HONK HONK HONK} I keep hoping one of the truckers will get ambitions and try to play “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” or “The 12 Days of Christmas”, or what’s the fast paced one with the tubular bells. That would be a hoot!

Anyway, the new window is in and I really like it. It really changes the little bathroom room a lot. The space seems smaller and bigger at the same time. I kind of screwed up on the siding I bought. I only needed a little bit to fill in what I didn’t have in the way of salvage. I was using an adjacent wall with an identical window as a pattern to determine how much siding I needed to purchase. What I didn’t realize was that the adjacent wall has an extra row of siding because of the way the porch roof slants down further over the bathroom wall. So I now have an extra 12-foot piece of siding that I don’t need. There’s $41 down the drain.

I was able to get everything caulked and puttied so it is water tight and ready for the winter. Now I just need a few days of dry weather so I can paint. I’m thinking…..early March.

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