Weather Woes
So there not the same weather woes that others are experiencing, they are still woes, none the less. All week I’ve been demo-ing and prepping with nice weather in hopes of installing the "new" stained glass window on the exterior bathroom wall, and now it’s supposed to rain starting Friday.
The plan was to do all the grunt work on Saturday, but if it’s coming down in buckets, that’s not going to happen. A light sprinkle I can deal with. The occasional cloud burst, you know, not the end of the world. Sheets of water coming in sideways – that would be a problem. So, what are we going to get? I wish I knew.
At this point, I’m still moving ahead as if I have a Go for window replacement. Of course, it’s much more that just a window replacement because I will be pretty much residing the whole wall in the process. Only the first 3 rows of siding are staying, and everything else is being replaced.
All the new siding is now prepped and primed and sitting in the shop straddled across the table saw and miter saw. The window is in the butler’s pantry, and all the new 2X4s are waiting in the utility room. I removed all the floor to ceiling beadboard in the bathroom to expose the windows that I will be removing. In doing so, I discovered they weren’t installed very well in the first place.
This is a 1920s hack job when the place was cut up in to apartments. The only thing holding the windows in place is the exterior casing. They just stuck them in the hole and nailed on the casing! The windows aren’t attached to the house at all! A stiff wind could probably take them out. Sheesh! Would a few nails have killed you?
4 comments:
I think that's how our windows were put in, in the 20's, at least our basement windows. It seems like they nailed on the casing to the window first (or they came frome the lumberyard like that), then just nailed the casing to the house.
My 1923 Bungalow has the windows and door frames installed the same way - They are held in place with the trim - Trim is nailed to the frame, and also nailed to the wall. I found this out when I was removing the trim for stripping and drywalling, and windows suddenly got very loose. There must be some reason they did it this way, perhaps to allow for expansion and contracting, or to keep the windows from getting out of square when the house settled?
Maybe that is a common way to do it then. When I remvoed the 1920s addition I took out a lot of windows and they seemed to be held it a lot better.
The house we tore down was built in the 1940's, and all the windows were free floating too. However, I believe the Devil Queen's windows are toe-nailed into the framing. I wonder what happened between 1890 and 1940?
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