Whoa to Wow

There’s so much I could say about Olivia. She is such an old soul full of stories. Yet, she tells them quietly — matter of factly. Listening to them you begin realize after the fourth or fifth one that this young lady has lived whole lives in the space most of us haven’t even finished living one.

Olivia is also an expert when it comes to windows. Any windows. Though she prefers to work on fancy windows — stained glass or leaded — the more complex the better, she will sometimes for a friend like me lower herself to work on ordinary rope and sash windows.

Olivia is making sure all of the windows in the Hague house, most of them original, work as well as the day they were installed. Re-glazing and repairing. Re-roping and proper weighing.

As our mutual friend Anders Christensen says…

Old double hung windows with glazing, ropes, and weights are designed to be repairable. “Big Window” has very successfully convinced the public and policy makers that replacing old windows with new windows is the environmentally responsible thing to do. It may not be the Big Lie, but it is one of the many Little Lies in the realm of restoration, renovation, and remodeling…

Old, original double hung windows with glazing, ropes and pulleys can be repaired, reconditioned, and restored with materials that are readily available at any good local hardware store. If you replace your original double hungs with new factory windows, you become completely dependent upon the manufacturer for parts and repair. If the manufacturer stops making the parts or if they cease operations, you are out of luck.

Also, you don’t need to buy new windows to get good performance…

We all know that most of the heat loss of a building goes out the top. Studies have shown that the difference between properly maintained original double hung windows and new windows is negligible. Thus removing old, original windows that can be reconditioned and sending them to the landfill to be replaced by new windows that require the extraction of new natural resources from the Earth and the energy involved in manufacturing and transportation makes no environmental sense whatsoever.

So, take it from Anders, Olivia, and me… Don’t replace. Repair.

There’ve not been a ton of updates lately. That’s because so much of what we’ve been doing isn’t flashy. Lots of little “whoas” and no “wows”.

It’s wood filling nail holes in trim. It’s caulking edges and touching up the paint.

It’s re-attaching (not changing) light fixtures now that the ceiling is painted.

It’s installing a baseboard heater and having it take longer than expected and trying to troubleshoot why it wasn’t working and calling the electrician twice for advice only to have him figure out it was never hooked up to the breaker box in the first place.

It’s picking up and organizing the tools that seem to have been scattered to the four winds so that they are easier to find for the next project.

It’s the small details and finishing touches that others might not notice but you not only know they are there waiting for you to be done but can’t unsee them even after you walk away.

And even on the days when nothing gets done, when my attention is turned to other things, the project still lingers in my mind. A problem I walked away from the day before because I could not figure it out is often solved as I’m drifting off to sleep or just waking up.

In the pictures I share you may see a before, a during, and an after, but seeing them all together you have no sense that between those were dozens — perhaps hundreds - of choices and challenges in-between each shot. You see not the labor but the love.