60. Front Porch Window

Sometimes the easiest projects can have a huge impact.  This is the street view from inside the sunroom.  Up til now I had a bunch of salvaged wood stored in here, and I had never cleaned the windows.  But last week I found four awesome tab-top curtain panels for $4.94 and hung them on the $1 Ikea curtain rod I got from the Habitat for Humanity thrift store.  I mean come on - it don't get much better than that.  Add a couple of $5 chairs and a $10 light fixture... and you are singing my song.  Just a taste of how awesomely cool this house is going to be when I get through with it.

I stood back and admired that view for a minute, took a deep breath, and finally began the restoration of the front porch window.  The paint was all chipping, the trim had been removed back when the front wall was done.  The glass was broken.  I had a piece of replacement glass that I had ordered from Dave months ago, but this project kept getting put on the back burner... until now.  This is the window sill, which is representative of the rest of the window's exterior wood.  I used the heat gun, and over the course of two days managed to strip most of it off.  Fortunately the woodwork inside wasn't quite as bad - needed just a little sanding to be ready for primer.

Here's the full view of the window all taken apart.  The bottom part had to be taken out, and re-glazed, but since I did a lot of glazing photos with the kitchen window, I skipped that part.  See those spaces along side the window jamb?  Inside there are the sash weights, which got some new rope.  Unfortunately the pulleys that the rope is supposed to slide over are in rough shape.  One worked ok but the other kept pinching the rope.  It's about $45 per pulley to replace them, so that's just going to have to wait.

This is the inside, where the sash weight rope is knotted and fits into a neat little groove in the side of the window.  After installation was complete, the window went up and down fine, but not as nicely as it would if both pulleys were working.

Here is all the stuff I used to make a new screen for the window (except the screen material).  The white pieces are cut to size with a hack saw or metal jig saw blade.  They fit together using that corner piece.  The black coil you see is called spline, and it's shoved into that groove in the white metal piece using that pizza-cutter looking thing there.  I probably should have gotten a few more pics but it was late...

Here now is the window, all painted and put back together.  An extremely satisfying project, even though it was a marathon and took two whole days.  I love it.

This is the inside view, with some more $4 curtains.  The black things at the top are just unpainted areas left from when I removed those ugly wooden valances - that will all be covered up when I paint the rest of the room.

The really big news is the counter tops are going in this week, and soon thereafter I will have everything in my kitchen including the kitchen sink.  I will also be finishing up the siding by the garage door, which is the last item that needs to be completed before inspections!