There are many resources online that highlight what is involved in restoring original wood window sashes. I won't do anything groundbreaking here, rather this is more of a timeline of what's involved to restore a window properly. I say that knowing full well that this isn't a truly accurate restoration. I'm not planning on having the downstairs windows operable and so they will be painted shut. I plan to go all out for my upstairs windows though. The process will be much more thorough as each sash will have to be removed and fixed one by one.Step one in the process is scraping and sanding down the wood (duh). Depending on how hardcore you want to be these could go all the way to bare wood or just a light scraping. I choose to be middle of the road here. These three windows took about 10 - 15 hours of work. If I can't get the old paint off by careful scraping and sanding, then the paint is still in decent enough condition to stay on for a fresh coat. Get off any old glazing around the glass if needed and expose any gouges down to bare wood if at all possible. This should get them ready for the next phase: dry rot treatment.
2 comments:
Thanks for doing this! I'll be attempting my windows when I get the nerve up... it will be good to see it "done".
Hehe, I remember back when I first tried this. I think maybe I thought if I did something wrong they would spontaneously burst into flames.. Once I dived in I found it wasn't too bad -- although it takes a lot of time and patience. :)
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