DIY: Wooden Window Rescue- Repair and Restoration of Vintage Double-Hung Windows, Stripping Woodwork, and Appropriate Technology

Also, the Alchymist is about to bloom, and should be MAGNIFICENT this year. I hope it brings some folks some joy and beauty in these rough days. I’m going to try to propagate it after it blooms and if I have success, will be happy to share the magic if you have room and sunshine.

Update: I’ve got 3 out of 5 windows unstuck from the paint and caulk that were gluing the top sashes up. Still a TON of work to do but it’s already better- When you have a 74″ tall window in your kitchen and it’s open at the top and has a fan at the bottom, even without an exhaust hood it’s so much cooler when we’re cooking (there’s an orphan chimney right by the stove but it needs to be lined and repaired before it would be functional to vent out of)… but our almost ceiling height window works pretty well so far for keeping the temps down and the cooking steam and grease out of the rest of the house.

There are two more almost floor to ceiling windows in the dining room that I still need to unstick. Like the rest of the windows before I started working on them, the bottom sashes open (with some difficulty, and some need to be propped open) but not the tops. Last year I replaced a lot of the old screens (which were filthy but more importantly, falling apart and full of holes) in the triple-track aluminum storms with new bright aluminum screen. When I have the window sashes out to restore, I’ll scrub the corroded aluminum frames and tracks of the storms, and I’ve already straightened and lubricated some of the bent spring pin catches that sometimes needed vise grips or pliers to open. Like a lot of us right now, they aren’t perfect, but now they’re mostly functional? I need to figure out what type of lubricant to use on the storm window tracks (graphite? silicon? iced coffee and maybe a shot of rye? No, wait, that’s me) to get them moving more smoothly.

I also installed inexpensive bamboo roller blinds on all of our south-facing windows in my office, the kitchen, and dining room (and nicer cordless bamboo blinds in the AirBNB kitchen) which have made a huge difference in the solar gain on hot sunny days, keeping us cooler in our non-air conditioned house, and also adding a lot of privacy. I miss the natural light but it’s a tradeoff, and they still let in filtered light without as much heat – the temperature delta between our indoor and outdoor temperature (on the Nest thermostat) is already several degrees cooler since I put them in. Always rewarding when the new tech tells you that the very old tech is working!

And because the windows are daunting and I needed dopamine NOW, I also started slapping some stripper on the trim in the front foyer and the front door, to try to liberate a little bit of wood grain from the layers of suffocating sticky butterscotch latex paint (that’s drippily covering every bit of detailed millwork trim and almost every solid wood panel door upstairs), the 70’s faux oak woodgrain finish, and the original dark stain and varnish (oh why oh why didn’t they leave that alone or just freshen it up- time and trends change but it was soooo much better and would have saved my wrists and budget both).

I have wanted to do this since I moved in six years ago, but was afraid of opening that particular can of worms (the paint was awful but at least it matched, and who knows what was underneath?). I already prefer the distressed look of the half-stripped door (it’s too “shabby chic” for my partner, but I prefer the distressed mess that reveals a bit of what’s underneath to the horrible cover-up job) and can’t wait to see how this looks with the rest of the paint off. It’s also helping me with the puzzle piece of how to deal with the jambs and sashes of the windows… the outside jambs and the window sashes are getting oil-primed and painted (not sure, but probably either a cream or a very dark neutral alkyd enamel?) but I’m still not sure about the inside sashes and trim. I want to strip, stain, and varnish them, but also, I want to win the lottery and have them dipped and professionally done instead (or to immediately buy a farm far, far away from the city, more likely) and I am not sure which will happen first. I guess we’ll see how it goes as it’s going along…

After this door and maybe some of the foyer trim, nothing else gets stripped until the windows are done, especially since that’s a time sensitive project and with the low-VOC Smart Strip, I can do more doors this winter in the basement work room which is finally not full of bales of cellulose- they’re all in the attic, finally, though not all installed… progress though! Yes, my future reward for finishing the hard work of rebuilding our windows is… more tedious work? I don’t get it either but this is the brain I have? I only wish that the rest of the problems we’re facing (climate catastrophe, political strife, loss of bodily autonomy and the rising tide of fascism and bigotry, for starters) had such straight-forward solutions. I don’t pretend to know what to do about those but I hope that we can do the work.