Bullet Hole Begone

New from Ronco it's Bullet Hole Begone!

This is a new, must-have product for any Crack House owner. Just spray it on and the bullet holes are gone! It's just that simple!

Oh, if only it were that simple. The time came for me today to remove the large piece of colored glass with the bullet hole in it. The glass was installed in 1895 and hasn't moved since. The bullet hole was from a drug deal gone bad, sometime in the 1990s. Getting the glass out was a bit of a nail biter. As always, when doing something like this, my mantra is, 'Above all else, do no harm'.

It was also more than a one person job, so fortunately Megan was here to add in her two capable hands. She may come back and re-glaze all 41 pieces of glass in the window once the new piece is in place. For the past few months she has been working at a monster Victorian six blocks away restoring all of the windows.

This is another one of those projects which has been playing out in slow motion over the past decade. One of the first things I did when I bought the house was to buy a 32-inch square piece of red glass from Kokomo Glass to fix the window.

Most glass makers only make glass in 24-inch widths, but Kokomo makes it in 32-inch widths. The problem was, there are no Kokomo distributers in the area, and shipping a single piece of glass would be crazy expensive. I found a distributer in the Bay Area who worked with Kokomo and had them order it with the normal shipment. I then had to make the twelve hour round trip to get it. All told, it cost nearly $350 for the glass. One thing lead to another, and I never did anything with it. It has been up in the attic for nearly ten years. Well, I'm doing the parlors, so I've got to fix the glass.

Unfortunately I could not find red flash glass in a large enough size, so I'm putting in red cathedral glass. I think one of the reasons I never put this in was because I always hoped I would find a manufacturer of red flash glass. Flash glass is essentially normal plate glass like you would put in a window, but it has the color flashed on to the surface. This is opposed to colored glass which has the same color all the way through. 

The glass shop owner in Arcata where I've gotten my other colored glass says he can get red plate glass in the size I need from a manufacturer in Germany. It would cost around $900 to get it. I'm hard-core, but I have my limits. That shop owner will be cutting the new circle for me this week, and hopefully I can get it installed next weekend. 

I won't rest easy until it is installed and glazed.

Note the classy piece of plywood. This is a piece of the same plywood they used to cover the failing plaster in the foyer. I have used and reused that plywood on soooo many projects over the years. If I ever do another house and it doesn't come with quarter inch plywood on the interior walls, I think I might just go buy a couple of sheets. It is very handy to have around.