One Photograph, One Story
It Was a Commitment!
Hours of scraping and sanding reveal the bare wood beneath an original old house window sash, and finally the rebuilding can begin.
There is a moment in almost every project when things stop getting worse.
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| Hours of scraping and sanding disappear pretty quickly once the finished old window goes back together. This photograph remembers them. |
Look at that old window sash, likely make in 1926 or '27. And, I showed every year and later of paint. It's earned a bit of a restoration!
The true secret of happiness lies in taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life. - William Morris
By the time I took this photograph, the glass was out. The old glazing was gone. The paint had been scraped away. The wood had been sanded down to bare wood.
And I had spent hours getting it there.
Scraping.
Sanding.
Scraping some more.
Then sanding the places I apparently hadn't sanded enough the first time.
Original wood window restoration has a peculiar way of making you question exactly how much you love original windows.
But there it was.
Bare wood.
The sash lying on my worktable in the basement, another one waiting behind it, and a can of acetone sitting right in the middle of everything.
For once, I wasn't taking a picture of something I had just finished.
I was taking a picture of something that was finally ready to begin.
Up until this point, nearly everything I'd done had been subtraction. Remove the glass. Remove the glazing. Remove the paint. Scrape away decades of accumulated finish until eventually you arrive at the thing somebody made in the first place.
Wood.
Nearly a century old and still perfectly willing to be a window.
Now came primer. Paint. Stain. Fresh glazing. Glass back in.
But look beyond the sash.
There's almost thirty years of House 173 hiding in this photograph.
Look up into the open joists.
That's my scrap collection.
Trim boards, old lath, strips of molding and assorted pieces of wood have been tucked up there over nearly three decades. Some came out of House 173. Some were left over from projects. Some were saved because they were old, useful or simply too good to throw away.
And every so often, I actually need one.
Which, of course, justifies keeping all of them.
Then look all the way into the back room, where the light gets brighter.
That's really the heart of the workshop.
The tool chest, shelves, workbench and all the accumulated tools and supplies are back there. I've spent countless hours in that little room making pieces for House 173, repairing things that probably would have been easier to replace, and occasionally searching twenty minutes for something I'm quite certain I put away five minutes earlier.
Nothing here was cleaned up for the photograph.
That's what my workshop looks like when something is actually happening.
And maybe that's why I like this picture.
The finished window will get photographed. It'll be clean and painted and stained and glazed and back where it belongs. I'll admire it as though I hadn't spent several days muttering things about it that can't be printed here.
But that photograph won't show any of this.
The scraps overhead.
The bright workshop in the back.
The acetone can.
The dust.
The hours of scraping and sanding that completely disappear once the work is done.
This photograph remembers them.
And there, sitting quietly in the middle of almost thirty years' worth of making and saving and fixing things at House 173, is the proof:
We finally made it to bare wood.
For additional reading, check out the Window Preservation Standards Collaborative at:
Hey, thanks for stopping by - see ya' next time!
