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Recycling windows is a leap of faith
comments (0) June 25th, 2008 in Blogs
Kevin Ireton, editor-at-large
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Saturday was the first day of summer, and I finally took down the storm windows in the living room and swapped them out for screens. The windows are casements with interior storms and screens, so it’s an easy-enough chore. I don’t have to drag out a ladder. I actually look forward to this semiannual ritual, this changing of the guard, because it makes me think about where those windows came from and how they got here.
My wife is a land surveyor, and about 15 years ago, she and her boss surveyed a property in downtown Milford, Conn. A house was being torn down to make room for a new parking lot at Milford Hospital. Cynthia’s boss was what you might politely refer to as thrifty, but which she blatantly called “cheap.” It was a trait Cynthia attributed to his Italian heritage. Being of Italian decent herself, she felt both qualified and sanctioned to indulge in such ethnic stereotyping. Her boss, in fact, shared many similarities with her father, chief among them a habit of returning from the dump with more stuff than he left with.
Anyway, Cynthia’s boss talked to the demolition contractor and got permission to ransack the house before it was bulldozed. I was invited along to see if there was anything I wanted. The house was a 1920s foursquare, formal and well built, the kind of place a doctor might have lived in. By the time I got there, all the obvious stuff had already been taken—the copper gutters, the oak fireplace mantels. Cynthia and I walked through the house jonesing to take something. The appeal of free building materials was made greater by the fact that we had recently bought our own fixer-upper and would certainly need something. But what?
Eventually, we drifted into a little sunroom, just off the living room. French doors led into the small space, which was ringed on three sides by 4-ft.-tall casement windows. I was utterly charmed and immediately said, “We’ll take these windows.” I had no idea what I would do with them, and I’m sure now that my decision was a response to the quality of light in the room, which I thought I could capture by taking the windows.
We spent an afternoon prying off trim, cutting nails, and unscrewing hardware. We drove home with nine windows, unloaded them in an old shed, and promptly forgot about them.
Five years later, after we designed the living-room addition for our tiny Cape, I remembered those old casements and went out to the shed with a tape measure. I didn’t think there was much chance of them fitting into our floor plan, but I had to check. When I sat down with our blueprints and a list of the window sizes, I couldn’t believe what I found. Eight of the windows would fit perfectly into our scheme, and the ninth would work downstairs in the walkout basement.
That was the good news. The bad news was that I now had to scrape and paint and reglaze and repair nine casement windows. Window restoration, at least for the inexperienced, is a nearly thankless task. It takes a very long time, and for most of that time, you’re thinking “it’s not worth it.” I say “nearly thankless” because right there toward the end of the process, about the time I installed the spring-bronze weatherstripping on the outside and the vinyl bulb inside, I realized two things. First, I knew that these windows were going to be amazingly energy efficient, even with single-pane glass. And second, I realized that my living room now had a charm that I couldn’t have duplicated with new windows.
The windows came with interior storms, but I had to make the screens. I even found new hinges to mate with the old. And now when I change out one for the other and see the tarnished knuckles interlock with the shiny ones, I feel again the satisfaction of hard work done well. I feel the triumph of patience and faith that those windows represent. And I have to admit that those thrifty Italians are right to be hauling good stuff back from the dump.
posted in: Blogs
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About this blog
As the editor of Fine Homebuilding, I spend my weekdays trying to produce a magazine that will satisfy 300,000 of the most demanding builders, both professional and amateur. As the owner of a 200-year old Cape in Connecticut’s Litchfield Hills, I spend weekends working on my house.
Each activity invariably informs, and complicates, the other. In this blog, I’ll offer observations from both worlds -- publishing and building -- with the hope of providing some useful or at least entertaining insights.
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