Still more on windows

Are you sick of hearing about windows yet? Because I am. But in the scheme of all the things that we could have to fix around the house, windows might be one of the cheaper and less extreme ones. You may remember that as we wait for our new vinyl ones to be ready to installed upstairs, we had a little incident in our basement. Actually, two incidents, resulting in two broken windows. I wanted them fixed quickly so that the litter boxes could again be hidden out of sight in the unfinished part of the basement (they were temporarily in our finished area of the basement, in plain sight of my elliptical machine, which is not a very inspiring view when exercising) and for security.

First we had to decide how we wanted them fixed. My parents suggested glass block windows, which provide extra security, insulation, leak prevention:

Try as we might, nobody seemed to want to install them for a reasonable price. Some people didn't "do" installations at all, only offering to sell us the supplies at much more than we could find at Home Depot. Others would do both, for at least $500/window (which is about what we're paying for our nice new triple-paned argon-filled fancy shmancy ones upstairs that actually have complicated parts), and others (general contractors) would do the installation if we provided the windows and paid them about $300-400/window.

No thanks.

Next we looked into getting some glass cut. Actually pretty easy to have done at Lowes. We measured the window from the outside and brought the measurements there. For $5/pane, we could get glass. For about $35 for a whole sheet (enough for us to cut two panes ourselves), we could get acrylic. It was then we realized an issue we hadn't considered when we thought about buying glass block: fire escapes. Glass block is impossible to break through. So is acrylic. Now, we do have a walk-up door in our basement, but suddenly I wasn't sure I wanted the "extra security" of not being able to break the windows. People can't get in, but they also can't get out. And besides, that's what home insurance is for, right.

So we went with plain old glass and then had to content with the actual installation. It was a multi-step process, which D pretty much took care of all by himself (someone had to take the pictures...).

1. Chisel out all the old glass and glazing.

This was much harder than we thought, since the glazing was pretty much solid as a rock and applied copiously. Here's a close-up of what had to be removed so that the new pane could sit correctly in the frame:

Removing all that crud was what took most of the installation time. I used a little heat gun to assist but mostly it just took a few hours of chiseling. The finished result wasn't perfect but it was clean enough for the new pane to go in. We also had to be careful since the second pane in each broken window was still in tact, so we didn't want to hammer so hard that we broke that one too.

2. Apply glazing to the empty frame:

3. Carefully set the pane in the frame:

4. Apply more glazing to the other side of the pane. This took a lot more glazing than we thought and we ran out of one tube after just one window (we thought we could use one tube for both the windows).

5. Smooth the glazing with a putty knife and wipe up excess (like that stuff coming out of the caulk gun which fell onto the clean glass just after I took this picture):

6. Let dry, put back into window, and admire. (This picture really emphasizes the difference between new and old glazing--see how white the new one is and how dingy the old one is?)

In all, it cost about $40 (glazing was about $8/tube and we needed to buy the chisel) and maybe 4 hours of (mostly D's) time. It took almost as much time to call contractors for estimates. I think it was definitely worth doing ourselves and not paying for a contractor. Even if they could have removed the glazing faster, I'm sure it would have taken at least an hour or two at some exorbitant labor cost, plus materials. I will give D credit--he broke both windows but at least took care of them quickly and, it seems, correctly. Hopefully the panes don't come crashing out in a couple of days.

edited to add: D thought of the brilliant idea of adding bars to our two back windows, so that we get the security without having the heavy-duty windows. They are only about $25 from Home Depot and we can install them ourselves, plus they can open from the insides, so we are not compromising fire safety. Looks like that will be an upcoming improvement.

An Aside for Valentine's Day

Eight days late, I'm finally getting around to my intended Valentine's post, which is a bit of a departure from the usual home repairs update. In keeping with the "love" theme of the holiday, I wanted to write a post about how much I love our house. Now, it's not perfect and can definitely stress me out (we broke yet another window, but more on that another time) but it is a place that truly makes me feel comfortable and happy. Seems like a good relationship. Not only to I enjoy being at home but I enjoy doing things at home that I never enjoyed doing in our old apartment. Sitting and looking out our window (especially during a snowfall), for example. Or better yet (at least for those friends and family members who get to taste the results): cooking and baking.

I never liked being in our old apartment kitchen. There was no sense in making any significant improvements and everything was as cheap as they come. But here, we are lucky enough to have an already-remodeled kitchen that is beautiful and a place I really love to spend time (which is good, since it's where my computer desk is). And so, on Valentine's Day and in honor of the holiday's spirit, here is the proof of that love--a first attempt at homemade pasta and tomato sauce. A whole Sunday afternoon spent in a kitchen:

 

  

  

(No pictures actually making the pasta--my hands were too full of flour!) Fortunately the results were as tasty as they were fun.

Another unfun "surprise"

I had a great post lined up in honor of Valentine's Day about love and houses but then came this weekend's gutter problems and now another issue today, so a post about love will have to wait.

Last night when D was knocking yet more ice from the roof, I heard a loud crash. D said that it was just the sound of breaking ice but it really sounded like glass. Today I stepped into to the basement to find this:

Here's a picture with the flash so you can better see the evil-looking glass shards hanging from the frame:

Evidently the falling chunks of snow and ice shattered one of our basement windows. We are replacing six windows and none of the two that broke this year. Of course. So I cleaned up the glass pieces (which were everywhere) and changed the kitty litter (which was right under the window and ended up filled with little pieces of glass) and had a wonderful (and, fortunately, tall) friend cover up the hole:

Unlike our last breakage, we are going to have to fix this problem fairly quickly. First, because there is actually a hole, instead of a hairline crack, so it's really cold and also unsafe (though it would take a pretty brave and skinny burglar to get inside). Second, because it's at ground level, the melting snow is going to rip through that cardboard. Now we have to find a glass place and learn how to do some serious caulking. Apparently this is not something handled by windows companies, who only deal with new installations or replacements of full window sashes--nothing as unsophisticated as a pane of glass. Time to turn to google....

The unfun part of snow

Our house has received a lot of snow this winter. It's been very pretty and we've been very fortunate to not lose power, unlike many of our neighbors. Unfortunately the gutters are getting hammered. The snow is melting, then freezing into, onto, and over the gutters.

The front of our house gets the majority of the sun and is suffering most acutely from the ice issue. I've been knocking off the snow and ice from the edge of the roof every day. It hasn't been too hard, since I can reach the roof with a shovel from the ground.

I haven't been worrying about the back of the house since it's perpetually in the shade and shouldn't get the snow-melt to ice issue.

Wrong.

I think the kitchen vent in the bottom of the photo may have contributed to the extreme melting. I knocked the ice off, but the gutter was "linear-ized". That is to say, the gutter has changed in shape from a "U" to a "I". That'll probably have to be replaced come spring. Unless it can be bent back into shape.

Unfortunately that wasn't all. 

This portion of the gutter toppled down when I tried to knock the ice off it. The screws just ripped out of the wood trim. When the snow goes away we'll have to evaluate whether it can be bent back and salvaged. Probably not, though.

Unfortunately, the gutter looks like a continuous piece, so the entire gutter for the back of the house may have to be replaced.

Not Quite Easy

I spent Saturday painting the trim of the stairwell and then stopped before edging the gray because I realized there was a slight problem. The handrail. It's going to be pretty impossible to paint the wall without removing it but suddenly I was stumped as to the best way to do that.

I suspect the best way to do it (i.e. the way to not ruin all the holes and make them unusable) is to remove the screws holding the hardware to the actual wood handrail. Would the holes still be small enough then to slip the handrail right back into place when I'm done painting? It would be much easier to paint the wall if I removed the hardware at the wall, but I suspect I will do more damage to the plaster and have to fill the old holes and create new ones. That seems like a lot of unnecessary damage to the wall. Though maneuvering around them with a paintbrush doesn't exactly sound fun.

Either way, we're going to have to take one set of hardware off. See the second one up from the bottom of the picture?

Not only is the spacing completely off (the hardware appears to have been installed completely at random and we don't really care about that too much) but it turns out that it's not actually attached to the wall anymore. We can slip the screws in and out just by tugging on them. So however we remove the rest of the hardware, that one will have to come out entirely and be moved, which means holes to fill, new holes to drill (in both the handrail and the wall) and Spackle to sand. No wonder I lost my momentum on this project.

So the question for you, reader, is whether or not to remove the 2 screws on the handrail or the 3 screw on the wall, for those holders that are still functional. Leave your thoughts in the comments.

Another weird problem: now that we fixed all the hallway light bulbs, we discovered  that the switch on the right (which we thought went to the light with the broken bulb) actually doesn't go to anything. We thought one went to each light, but the black switch on the left apparently goes to both, leaving us clueless as to what the one on the right goes to. At some point, we'll have to have an electrician come and sort that out.

And just because I can, here's a picture of the morning after a big snowstorm. The snow was so thick and wet that it was slipping down our roof in one giant mass. We had some pretty monstrous icicles too but D knocked them off so that we wouldn't be impaled. I especially enjoyed watching the "hat" on our lamppost slowly shrink throughout the day:

Time for Round Two!

The holiday's are over and D is days away from finishing his thesis, so home improvement is back on the to-do list. This spring, we turn our attention to the upstairs. Now, those of you who have seen our home have noted that readers who have not had the pleasure may not even realize we have an upstairs to begin with. That was at least partially deliberate (very astute readers might have wondered about the extra bedroom I mentioned in this post). You see, we don't like to acknowledge that we have so much space. And since we have a Cape Cod-style house with a door to the stairs, we like to keep it closed and pretend it's a coat closet. But the time has come to recognize that behind the door are two more bedrooms and a full bath.

So we are going to finally begin work on the upstairs, specifically on the hallway and the future master bedroom. We're limited because we don't want to do any major painting until the windows are installed (probably early March) but there are small projects to keep us busy until then.

Here are some pictures and plans for what's going to keep us busy for the next month or two:

First, the hallway. The door on the left leads to the living room (here's an old picture for orientation of where the door is from the living room side)

You can see that thanks to some woodwork trim, there's a neat upper edge that divides the lower level from the upper level, which is very convenient when it comes to painting--they can be different colors and be painted at different times (which is good considering the upper half is going to take lots of fancy ladder configurations to get the ceiling and walls above the stairs). This month we're focusing on the lower half.

We're painting it Knitting Needle, the same color as the living room and painting all the trim white (it's all that pale yellow the previous owners seemed to love). We're also hanging new hooks from that band of wood above the light switches. We removed some pretty ugly ones but want to continue to use it for storage. We bought

3 sets of 3 Bjarnum hooks from Ikea that we think will look nice either in use or closed. Here they are in both positions:

Project two is the walk-in closet (not original to the house, obviously, since they didn't own so much junk in the 1950s):

Since the structure is all Closet Maid, I can make a lot of changes without having to totally start over. I'm planning to move the wire shelf down, since I am not 6'5'' like the previous people apparently were, and I might swap out the inefficient shoe cubby with something that will hold more. You can see the air-conditioning duct (the silver thing) that runs through the closet, so I can't mess with that much. Also since the closet is so big, I want to paint it. I'm leaning towards a silvery blue and hoping to find one of those really cheap cans of paint at Home Depot that was mixed and then returned. It's a closet, so I'm not that picky. Now's the time, since once it's full of clothes it will be impossible to empty out.

And finally the bedroom. You can see from the color that it was a little boy's room before. Though we're not going to do anything until the windows are installed, we're planning ahead and trying to decide how we want to decorate.

It may not be clear from the pictures but we have two dormer windows that bring a lot of light into the room. Each window also has a tiny shelf ( a little too narrow to sit on) and also "attic" doors on each side for storage. We like that the sloping ceilings end fairly high up, so the room is open and airy instead of claustrophobic, like a few Cape Cods we've seen.

Right now, we're planning to paint the walls a pale sage green and use blues and grays as the accent colors. We want our furniture to be shades of black and white stain and paint (D is a proponent of mismatched, eclective furniture though I tend to prefer buying in sets). We want a lot of storage and so have been looking everywhere for various storage beds (alternatively known as captain's beds). We've found a few good solutions by Pottery Barn, Gothic Cabinet Craft, and Blu Dot but Ikea beat them all out in price and customizability (that's not a word, but you know what I mean).The Ikea Mandal is really cheap and we can paint it whatever color we want. We bought one this weekend and I'm considering if it would be possible to stack two of them, for added storage space and height. Structurally, it does not seem impossible, though I can't find evidence of anyone else doing it...

The headboard (sold separately) is pretty cool and we might decide to buy it and install it somewhere else, but it doesn't quite do it for me as a headboard.

Other ideas for the bedroom: painting the ceiling a soft gray instead of bright white; installing a ceiling fan; installing wall lamps on each side of the bed; finding a headboard we like; turning one of the dormer cubbies into a little vanity area for me; finding plush, gorgeous rugs; finding the perfect floating nightstands that have a drawer (Most are just shelves. The drawers on the bed necessitate having a nightstand attached to the wall, so it doesn't block the drawers from opening).

And that's what's going on with us. As always, suggestions are always welcome. We really have no idea what we're doing, we just pretend like we do.