window to my [wall] hole

For those of you uninterested in DIY home repair just skip this post slog through this anyway. In solidarity and because there might be a quiz when I see you next. Eric, make pretend you're me listening to you about football. There, all set?

Okay, once upon a time there was a double-hung window in our garage apartment. It was a very old window with a rotten...uh, a rotten bottom. A rotten bottom that could not be patched or epoxied or camouflaged. It was dead.

One of the rare occasions that the multifaceted and beloved
duct tape just can't save the day. No disrespect.

We found an incredible place to look for a new old window. Turns out the size we needed was atypical even for the huge range of sizes used in unstandardized 1950. After searching through a plethora* of windows we found one that was the right size.

The window was buried under paint, caulk, glaze and liberally sprinkled with mold and schmutz. I don't think we needed to scrape off every iota but it was so therapeutic, we indulged. Scraped and sanded until Norm Abram would have beamed. We took out the glass, cleaned the shit off of everything and began to reconstruct. Primed, glazed and painted. See how I slipped glazing in there as if it were nothing? I'm too modest. Glazing sounds old-fashioned...like churning or darning. There used to be people who did nothing but glaze for a living. They were called, oddly enough, glaziers. Suffice it to say, I have new respect.

Yes, Virginia, that is green linoleum on our unrenovated kitchen floor.
Avocado green. Now, try to focus on the story at hand.

In addition to learning how to glaze, we learned that glazing takes 7-14 days to firm up enough to paint. 7-14 days? Who has that kind of time? We thought, well, maybe 7...but then realized that the one-week time frame was for arid, warm-toned, Sonoran Desert windows; two-weeks were definitely needed for windows expecting to reside in the subtropic steaminess of Houston. Well, shit, two-weeks it was.

Then, we had to make some adjustments to the existing window frame. I'll spare you the details. Just know that the new, resurrected (sorry for the misplaced holiday modifiers) window had a greater depth than the old one. There was sill trimming and wood putty involved.

And today, we installed the beauty. It opens. It closes. I'm beside myself.


* 1 plethora = like, 100