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The Wonders Of Glazing
It was presented as an option so I took the whole week off, for Thanksgiving, I guess.
It was the first full week of full days I have been able to spend on the Rocheblave project since I began almost nine months ago, which is a long time relative to the time it would have taken a fully competent person to complete this job. It was kind of nice. Maybe I'll do such work for a living down the road a piece. My imagination still gets the best of me though, and I did not complete as much as I imagined I would and I have to keep in perspective that in the end it will just look like a house and all the work will amount to little more than stored memory, and experience, I guess, the experience might have some value.
The Rocheblave house has a lot of windows for such a small ( 800 sq. ft.) house. Fourteen in all, unless you count the back door as window because of its' four panes of glass, and the two sidelights on either side of the front door, and the crescent above the front door and then you'd have say there are eighteen windows, in which case I really did not accomplish jack by refinishing and reglazing only eight of them.
The windows are double hung which means there are actually two windows in each opening which slide independently in their wooden frame tracks. The bottom window lifts up, and the top window can be brought down. They are commonly referred to by the number of panes in the top window over the number of panes in the bottom window. They can be one over ones, nine over nines, or just about any imaginable combination. The Rocheblave windows are six over twos. So the eight windows are actually 16 and amount to 64 panes of glass. I was a little better than jackleg at window glazing before the week, now I am a little better than that. The house to work in is purely depressing with the windows boarded up so after the glazing cures for a week or so I hope to prime and put one finish coat (color?) on them and expose my hard work to the world of vandals. But I have to have natural light. Which is to say I didn't do that well for my 20 months in Seattle some years ago.
The refinishing part was like this: A common disc sander, which looks like a drill with a five inch circular pad on the end, and is mostly Makita blue, and let me say that just about anything Makita made, before it's Johnny-come-lately competitors, is the superior product. That being said, I don't own anything Makita, but I did borrow a disc sander as backup for the exterior siding sanding, and I know what's up with their cordless drills. Anyway, the disc sander rotates at about 5,000 rpm, which is a nice, effective, almost soothing speed. Soothing that is compared to the 20,000 grinding whining rpm of the Roto-Zip with its attached "Zipmate" (sold separately) to which is attached the "Zipmate Back-Up Pad," which is designed to wear out and can't be replaced from any local retailers so you have to resort to online shopping and a place in Mass. gets one (or two) out to your doorstep by mail in three days. But that's what I used, the Roto-Zip, first with a 36 grit pad (are you mad man?), and then the 50 grit (that's still too rough), and finishing with 80 grit on a one quarter sheet orbital palm sander (80 grit to finish?, you call yourself an artisan?).
I'm looking for speed here in this sanding off of the previous interior (almost black, crackled stain) finish, and yet my tool and choice of grits are risky because a slip of the hand could cut one of these window frames almost in two, or more likely--gouge the shit out of it. So the high speed Zip has to just float above the surface, allowing just the tips of the roughest grit to come in contact with the wood. Once with the 36 to expose the bare wood, once with the 50 to make the bare wood look cleaner, and then over with the orbital 80 to try to take out the deep scratches of those previous two grits. The final product shows some circular scratches which is my testament to human frailty, and if interpreted properly (these scratches) can be used to determine winning lottery numbers, successful business strategies, and more importantly, if interpreted with careful precision, will lead to true love.
By the way, all this work is done with the windows unattached from their weighted sash ropes and removed from their frames, laid flat on saw horses.
So bare wood, what to do? I decided on stained woodwork against white walls from the beginning, to let it be like the original for awhile at least. So natural finish or some stain color and then finish? One way to determine what the wood will look like with a natural finish is to spit on it and then smear the spit around to see the darkened wood. But I did not use that method. I rubbed a rag with paint thinner over the wood and decided the result was pretty sexy, at least to someone who has almost forgotten what sex is like, and so I went to my local Sherwin Williams, on Earhart, and bought a gallon of Sanding Sealer, which let me break it to you gently home and busisness owners, many of us professional painters have been using this not only as the pre-finish (to lacquer, or such) but as the finish itself, for years. I have refinished a couple of chairs for my own self over the years and am more than satisfied with the results. If we think you are paying too much attention to our methods we peel the label off the cans, and say these are just our work pots.
Not yet, almost forgot, you know how wooden sash windows are, there's all that flat surface area but that part closer to where the glass will actually go almost always has some curve to it. Can't power sand. So the 64X (4 sides) of the curved sashes had to be stripped (rubber gloves, stripper, steel or brass bristled brush, steel wool, rinse with wet rag, and next day hand sand, maybe run a putty knife along the grooves to remove gunk, and then because that stain and sealer smeared all over the flat surface you need to do a quick resand of the flat areas with 50 and 80). Now.
Outside, in the sunny, brisk November air, on saw horses, eight of sixteen at a time--seal, sand, seal, sand, seal. They look good, so good you worry which of the people passing on the street and doing business at the Auto Title Transfer place next door might want to break in and steal them that night. But you sleep peacefully on Dumaine and are happy to see no breach of property the next day.
Then you glazed, that's like putty, applied along each side of each pane.
And the week ends and come tomorrow (Saturday) night your ex-wife and newborn sixteen-year-old son return from a week in the West. And you can't help but wonder why your leaving is taking so long.