The New Frontdoor Window

So, I've decided to venture in to the mysterious and intimidating world of stained glass. {Deep Breath} I'm going to attempt to make my own stained glass windows for my front doors {Exhale}.

Now, a lot of you probably have one or two ideas of what it takes to make stained glass or what are the requisite parts of a stained glass window. From what I can tell, stained glass falls largely in to three broad categories of construction. Old school stained glass uses lead came. These are the 'H' shaped pieces of lead (sometimes zinc) that are soldered together around the pieces of glass. The more modern method, which is a late 19th or early 20th method, uses copper foil that is wrapped around the edges of the glass and then soldered together. The last method uses wood instead of copper, zinc, or lead to separate and secure the pieces of colored glass. I believe these would be called muntins.

If you lived Back East 100+ years ago the leaded stained glass windows could be easily ordered from suppliers in almost every size and shape imaginable. There were huge catalogs of designs to chose from and even modest homes might have a front window with a leaded stained glass sash. It was quite popular.

A very eclectic design from The Carson Mansion (1887)


There are some fine examples of Victorian era leaded glass in Eureka, but really it is limited to the mansions. If you walk around Eureka, almost every home you see from the turn of the century has at least one stained glass window on it. What you don't see though, are a lot of the leaded stained glass. Most here are made with wood.

Two in the parlor


Better view of the large parlor window


Upstairs hallway


Close up of glue chip pane in hallway


Close up of blue glass


With lead came the designs can be as intricate and elaborate as you want. With wood, the designs are limited to using mainly squares, rectangles, diamonds, and the occasional circle. Historic House Parts of New York refers to these simple wood and colored glass windows as “Cottage Windows”. The Petch House came with 3 of them originally, as seen above.



In keeping with the original windows, above is my first design for the front door windows I want to make. The muntins will be redwood, of course. These are roughly 38X22. The corner squares are roughly 5X5. I added yellow to the mix because I have yellow glass left over from the butler's pantry cabinets. Next week I'm going to visit a local shop to see if they have anything that matches the purple glass that is in the big front window. I would like to match the color, but also that texture.

To see some eye-popping original Victorian windows from the 19th century visit the links below. I will not be held responsible for damage to any computer equipment while viewing these sites. Cover the keyboard with a towel and have your drool buckets handy. You have been forewarned.

Easy Boo (UK)

Historic House Parts (US)

Trimmed Out

I managed to get a few things done during the week. I finished pretty much all of the trim work in the bathroom, which really only amounted to trimming out one window, because everything else was done. It may not sound like much, but it included making a marble window sill (I think it’s called a stool when it’s on the inside), and I had to make the apron (the part under the stool), which entailed some router work. I also made the cove trim, which goes under the stool and in front of the apron.

On top of that, the casing is more of the 1895 casing I’m reusing from the front rooms. The pieces were thick with paint, so that meant more paint stripping. I then had to paint everything after it was installed. I do one coat or primer and 2 top coats. The whole thing was surprisingly involved.

The last thing to do in the way of trim is to make the counter tops for the 2 little built-ins. I was going to go with tile, but now I’m leaning towards marble. I have enough to do the little built-in but not the big one. Judging on what I’ve paid for marble in the past, I'm thinking it’s about $100 for the one counter. I don’t need to decide right now.

The paint on all of the trim is the SW Queen Anne’s Lace. It’s a very pale green and it’s a bit of a chameleon color. When it’s up against the darker green walls it looks very nice. On the lower parts though, it tends to get washed out by the white tile on the walls and floors. When looking at the door casing from top to bottom it almost seems to change colors. Not much I can do about it.

Here’s a few shots of the nearly finished trim. It was hard to get a good shot of the window because the light coming in prevented to flash from going off when I shot it straight on.

Mob Rule

The mob has spoken. The window stays.

I took in another light in today just to see what it would look like in real-world conditions. As I suspected the violet light is much more subdued with more lighting in the room. My fears of a violet explosion were unfounded.

An added benefit of keeping the window is that I will have an extra 5 sq ft of tile as a buffer zone because I won’t be tiling over the window. I will need to contact Subway Ceramics for some more quarter round tile, but that’s not a big deal. They were so speedy with the last delivery of tile I will wait until I’m farther along just incase I need any other additional tile.

Another idea I’m toying with is to use the Victorian Cap along the base of the window. It would act as a sill and give me a little more room for a shelf area for shampoo and whatnot. I would need to make sure it is tilted a few degrees to shed water, but think it might look cool and work well.

Victorian Cap


Today I stripped the paint off the sash and tomorrow I will caulk it back to the stone age and prime, and then paint on Sunday. I bought Sherwin Williams Duration paint this time, because it was on sale, and I’m not entirely thrilled with it. It seems to cover well at first, but then things bleed through. I used their “odorless” (Yea, right! Do marketers just think we are all idiots?) oil based primer and then two coats of the Duration on all of the wood work I painted.



On the beadboard bathroom ceiling I had some old water stains. I sanded the wood, then primer, and then 2 top coats, and in some areas the water stains still showed through. I had to go back over it a third time. These were decades old water stains too, because I pulled down some 1950s sheetrock from the ceiling 2 or 3 years ago and I’ve never had a leak in the room.

I had a similar problem with the medicine cabinet. It is made of fir and the original finish was a reddish tinted shellac. I stripped it and sanded but didn’t bother to go all the way to bare wood. I just wanted all the paint off and to get a smooth finish. Even with that, some of the red shellac bled through! There was almost none left but in those little cracks and corners where I missed some I had to go over it a third time! Even after a third coat in some places I still have one small spot with red bleeding through. Next time, I go back to the Super Paint. I’ve never had a problem like that with the Super paint and the laytex primer.

Bathroom Window Dilemma

In the “Bathroom Before” video I shot the other day I showed a window that I said was going bye-bye very soon. Well, this wasn’t entirely accurate. The window happens to be in what will be the shower. Windows in showers just seem like a bad idea because they beg for rot.

The problem is, I can’t really just remove the window. There are issues on the exterior of the house, that I won’t go in to detail now, that makes it difficult to remove the window. It’s a unique situation, that would take a while to explain, so just except the fact that for now removing the window is not an option.

Anyway, the plan has been to put either very dark glass or a very obscure glass in the window and then board it over from the inside. It would be walled over with tile on the inside and become one wall of the shower area. On the outside of the house the window sits a little over 7-feet up on the wall and there is a large box covering a sub-panel just below it. No one would ever be able to look directly in the window. The reason for the obscure glass or tinted glass was so it wouldn’t be obvious from the outside that you are looking at the back side of cement backer board.

It’s a bit of a hack job, I’ll admit, and not something I’m proud of, but it’s not the end of the world either. The window is definitely not original to the house and there is nothing architecturally significant about it. It is a single sash in a jamb that doesn’t open and never has opened. The window was installed in the teens or 20s and the jamb is salvage because it has pulleys for window weights but there is just the one sash that has no place to go. There is evidence that there was a sink on this wall at one time so they must have taken a double hung window, taken out the bottom sash, and raised the sill up.

So yesterday I went back to Stafford Glass to pick out some glass for the window. When I was in there last week getting the Florentine glass I spoke with them about it then. They showed me some dark tinted glass, but it only came in quarter-inch thick glass. Normal window glass is an eighth of an inch thick. This was that kind of glass that was very popular in the 70s & 80s for making those glass front stereo cabinets. Remember those? Ugh!

The other options were the myriad of obscure glass that they had to offer. There are more than 40 to chose from. Prices start at around $10 a sq ft and go up to about $22 a sq ft. Not cheap as far as glass goes. I need 5.5 sq ft to do the window. I needed something that would really obscure the view, and wouldn’t you know it, the nicer looking glass that really obscures the view was up in the $15 to $20 range. We’re talking around $100 to put new glass in a window I’ll never be able to look out of.

As I said in an earlier post, Stafford Glass is a small shop run by a husband and wife team. It was the wife who was showing me the glass samples and as we looked at the different samples and figured the price I let out the appropriate guttural sounds of someone who doesn’t want to part with $100 for glass. As we were looking she mentioned to me that her and her husband were retiring and the shop would be closing for good in 18 months when their current lease runs out. It’s a great loss for the community.

She finally suggested we go out in to the shop and look at remnants. They are eager to begin to clear out inventory instead of ordering new glass. We started going through the glass and either nothing caught my fancy or the pieces were too small. Finally she pulled out a piece of purple glass. She called it violet. It was heavily textured with….well look at the picture and come up with your own description. She said it was a piece of salvaged glass and she would let it go for $5 a sq ft. If you’ve read my blog for more than a week you know what my answer was.

Salvaged glass..…Relatively cheap…. Ding-ding-ding-ding-ding-ding! We have a winner!

See the old pulleys at the top left and right




I don’t know if this is salvage from the 1870s or the 1970s, but it doesn’t matter, I really like the color. As I was putting it in though, the plan was still to cover it up from the inside. I put it in last night and finished up pretty late. Today when I got home from work I went in to the kitchen and I could see the color streaming out of the bathroom. The window faces south and the color from the sun hitting the glass just changes the whole room. It’s just spectacular. This was at midday and the whole room was bathed in this pale purple, er...I mean violet light. At dusk it became more subdued but still very pleasant. In the evenings it looks like almost black glass, but there is still a bit of color to it.

Now I’m thinking I should keep the window. I wouldn’t have any wood trim around it. Instead I would tile inside the jamb all the way to the sash and use quarter round tile at the 90 degree angle at the transition from the wall to the jamb. The sash is redwood and will be painted. I can goop up any gaps with high quality caulk (3M 5200 to the rescue!)

On the other hand, I have to ask myself, would the violet color be too much? Would I get sick of the bathroom always bathed in violet light. There is the other stained glass window on the other wall that is boarded over right now to protect the glass, so the light from that window may tone it down a little. Also, the room is not well lit now, but will be when the bathroom is finished. Good lighting should also tone down the violet color. I’m not sure what to do.

It’s not something I have to decide on right now. I’ll live with it for a few days and think it over.

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.

Before


After


Before

After

Rib Not Lest Ye Be Ribbed

Yesterday I ribbed the 1920s carpenters for their apparent shoddy workmanship when they installed the 2 big windows in the then remodeled scullery. They didn’t nail the windows to the framing of the house. Instead, they nailed the casing to the windows, then installed the windows, and then nailed the casing to the house. The windows themselves aren’t actually nailed to the house.

After I posted that, a few people commented that their windows were done the same way. That got me to thinking that maybe this was a common way to do it. For all I know, this was the most common way to do it. Not only that, but the windows did stay put for 80+ years, so who am I to say it’s wrong.

With that in mind, I’ve decided to install the new stained glass window the same way. It will help out incase the weather is less than perfect on Saturday, which it probably will be. It will just be one less thing I have to do outside. We are scheduled for rain to start Friday evening with showers Saturday and “Few Showers” Sunday.

Today I scrapped, sanded, and primed the bottom three rows of siding that will be staying put on the outside of the house. I can use the interior window casing that I already removed to use as the new exterior casing for the stained glass window. It’s obvious it’s from the 1920s because it is clear, heart redwood, and it is not High Victorian fluted casing like the rest of the house. It’s just flat 1X6 stock. This of course means I have to strip off the googles of layers of paint. It’s probably a good thing I do some paint stripping because I’d almost forgotten what burnt paint smells like. We wouldn’t want that, now would we?

Sorry DCI, I didn’t mean to steal.

As I mentioned a week or so ago, I was down at Almquist Lumber to buy 3 feet of oak for the high-tank toilet frame. While I was there I was amazed to see that they had 1X8 redwood shiplap siding in the same profile as my house. I’m going to be needing a total of about 80 feet to fill in on the back wall of the bathroom after remove the two big windows and put in the small stained glass window.

I have some salvage left, but it’s really the bottom of the barrel stuff, and I knew there would never be enough. I had visions of paying huge sums of money to have 30 or 40 feet custom milled, so you can see why I was thrilled when I saw this stuff at Almquist. They didn’t have much, though. The guy told me they only keep a little in stock for people who need to make repairs. This profile was very popular at the turn of the century and you see it on a lot of homes in the area. Some refer to it as Rustic V Groove Shiplap.

I calculated that I needed 6 pieces 12-feet long, and 10 pieces 5-feet long to fill in after I removed the windows. From the wood shed I was able to get three 12-footers and eight 5-footers. That left me a deficit of three 12-footers and two 5-footers, so today I drove out to Almquist to get the remaining pieces.

I took in a sample and told the guy at the counter I saw some just like it when I was in here last week. He said, “Oh yes, the old redwood stuff. We don’t have much.” To which I said, “Well, I don’t need much”. We went back and found it and it seemed there was even less than before. There were two 14-footers and a few 10-footers, and then some scraps that were no longer than 6-feet. I was getting a littler nervous. I could always put multiple short pieces on a row, but it would look odd on such a small wall. Suddenly, behind some pine siding he found a whole stack of 12-footers. Very nice. We grabbed 3 off the front of the stack, and I grabbed one of the 10-footers, and we headed out to ring it up.

The price was a little less than I was quoted over the phone. It came to $3.21 a foot, and while that’s not cheap, it’s a hell of a lot cheaper than getting it milled. When I got home and started priming it, I found some writing in chalk on one of the 12-footers we pulled off the hidden stack.

Oops! Sorry DCI.