The Living Room Windows

The image on the left is an overall view of the wall full of windows in our living room, at the front of the house. I apologize for the poor quality; my camera was fooled by the amound of light coming in the windows themselves. It was late in the day and the room faces east, so the light was reflected off the school across the street. The right image is a closer view, with better color, showing the paint on the walls, ceiling, and trim. The walls are a fairly dark semigloss red with a little blue in it--I refer to it as "Biological Interior Red." Semigloss highlights the imperfections in the walls (which are after all 120 years old) making them look more like leather than plaster. The ceiling color is called "salmon." For scale, the ceiling is 9 1/2 feet high, and the windows are about seven feet high.

When we moved in, the windows looked a lot like this, except they had so much paint on them, the grooves in the woodwork were filled in. And the walls were a drab pale yellow. We heat-stripped the trim down to the original lacquer, then decided it would be too much effort to chemically strip off the lacquer ourselves. So I pulled the trim off the walls and sent them out to be dip-stripped (for less than $2 per linear foot--not bad). In the meantime, I chemically stripped the windows and frames. Some of the smaller bits of trim, especially the "stop trim" that holds the windows in place, were too damaged and/or too much trouble to salvage by stripping. I bought a tablesaw and replaced them with new wood milled very similar to the old profile. I also replaced an (inexplicably) unornamented board in the "T" pattern in the middle of the center window-set. I used a spare piece of trim from elsewhere in the house, and beveled the ends myself.

After everything was stripped clean, I got the right-hand window moving again--it had been painted shut for decades. After I cut it free, I immediately had to scrape off all the loose paint on the outside and protect the window and frame with fresh paint. I also had to rig up a metal shield on the outside bottom edge, to keep rain from forcing its way under the window, as it is not angled down to drain properly.

I filled holes and painted the trim and windows with one coat of primer and one coat of gloss white before remounting the trim. While all this was going on, I repaired the walls--I had damaged the plaster pretty severely in the process of removing the trim. (One thirty-inch piece of trim had been secured in place with nine four-inch nails. Go figure.) The electrical outlet below the windows in the center was mounted to the weak plaster instead of the studs, so I had to replace about 1 1/2 square feet of plaster with plywood. Two or three gallons of drywall mud and a pile of sandpaper later, the walls were paintable. I put up two coats of Pepto-Bismol-colored primer, then three coats of the red semigloss. It was much easier to paint the walls without any trim there--less brushwork.

After remounting the trim to the finished walls, I caulked all the gaps, hung the moving windows from their weights, and applied the final coat of gloss white paint, on August 29, 2004. I even reattached the hardware, so there are little handles to pull them up, and old-fashioned locks to keep them closed.

You may be able to see that one piece of trim and one corner block are missing from the top of the right window. They have been sent to a lumber company to serve as templates; we are having trim milled to replace much of what's in the rest of the house, for example the upstairs. Also, obviously, I have not yet finished the baseboard.

Main page.
Home Improvement pages:
The living room window trim and paint.
The fireplace we had we had reconditioned to burn wood again.
The dining room floor repair and paint colors, and preparation for the cabinets.
A set of cabinets we installed in the dining room.
A set of French doors installed between our dining room and back porch.