Window!

I took the day to work from home today, as our electrician was supposed to be out to install our new service entrance.  While the line from the street was disconnected, we were also going to have our wonderful and awesome landscapers limb our Japanese Maple (one half of it is strangely dead, but the other half is quite healthy).  Unfortunately, our electrician was unable to make it, but I didn’t know until well after noon.  Since the line from the street wasn’t going to be down, the landscapers couldn’t limb the tree.  This left me with a whole lot of preparations done for nothing and a sense of mounting frustration.

I decided to take out some of that frustration on our front window.  I’ve been wanting to get this window open since I bought the house almost five years ago.  When I first started working on the living room a few months ago, I cut the multiple layers of paint with razor blades and paint scrapers.  I cleaned-out decades of old caulk.  I cleaned the chains and pulleys that formed the window suspension.  I removed the painted-shut latches.  After all of that, I was only able to move the window about an inch.

Today, I resolved to get the window open.  It seemed to be the paint that was causing the window pane to bind along a header that separated the large pane from the transom.  So I busted-out the heat gun and scraper and went to town on the window pane.  After about an hour of working on this (with full NIOSH respirator gear and all), the pane was clean.  Now it moved just a little bit more.  After some more scraping and clearing of other areas around the header, I was finally able to muscle the window into an open position.

Whole Lee Cow.  I always read that these houses were designed for good ventilation.  I had long suspected that the reason the living room didn’t get good ventilation was because we couldn’t open that big window.  As soon as I opened the window, this huge rush of air started flowing through the room and out the window.  A ha!  It does work.  The whole lower floor got this wonderful set of cross-breezes going, and it feels great.  I can’t wait to get the room finished and get the plastic out of the pocket doorway–I’ll bet that the combination of that, and being able to open the rest of the windows in the dining room, will make for some awesome ventilation happiness.  See?  Those victorians weren’t so crazy after all….

jonathan