Peter Lohmann walks through restoring a center sash from an 1895 house's front windows. After stripping and sanding, he filled checks with epoxy, glued a broken piece, and removed the original muntins to rebuild them later. Next: primer, glazing, and two top coats before reinstalling.
Hey, it's Peter. I'm down here in the workshop. I'm in the middle of restoring this sash. This is the center sash for the set of windows that are in the front of the house, and I'm about halfway through restoring it. As you can see, I've gotten all the paint stripped off, and I just completed the final sanding. We're getting ready to prime it. So I thought I'd just take some time and kind of show where I am in the process for anyone that was curious about what goes into restoring these old wood windows. This house was built about 1895, and these are the original casement windows. And in parts they're in rough shape, and other areas they're in great condition. One by one, I'm just going through and completely restoring them. So this sash here, this is the inside we're looking at right now, and it's, as you can see, pretty good. There's areas where I made repairs down this end, a little bit there, a little bit of checking, and then up here at the top there's actually a piece that broke off right here that I kept and saved and glued back in, and then just put some epoxy around it to strengthen it. Let me show you the back, the outside. The outside is in much worse condition. This is one of the worst sash in the house as far as the exterior condition. Just back up so you can get a full view here. This particular sash is unique in that there's no muttons. It's not a divided light, it's just a single big sheet of glass. Actually, there's that piece of glass right there. I was able to get it out in one piece thankfully, but this sash has been long neglected. It took a lot of work. You can see all the repair work. The darker areas here is liquid wood epoxy, and then the The white areas are what's called wood epox. Both of those are products made by a company called Abitron. They specialize in wood restoration products and other restoration products for things like concrete. So this whole area was just filled with checks, which are these long cracks, and required just a lot of attention. I didn't do a 100% perfect job. I mean, these windows sit behind storms anyway, so it's not essential that they be built to withstand another 100 years of the elements. But yeah, lots of epoxy was used. You can see that this used to be a divided light because you can see all the remains of the muntins here. One day I'd like to come back and rebuild and restore these muntins, reinstall them and make this a true divided light again to match the rest of the house. This was the bottom of the sash and it was completely rotted out. There was a big hole there where the muntin used to be. So as I said, I'm about to prime these, prime this sash. I'm using this Sherwin-Williams oil-based primer. And once the primer's dried, we'll be ready to glaze it, and then there'll just be two top coats and it'll be ready to be reinstalled.
