Has been a poser, but the internet can solve anything.
Step one: if the sash won’t lift easily, oil the track. We tried graphite. No go. What works: Peanut oil. Machine oil. Any fine oil. Lifts like a charm. Treat both upper and lower sash tracks. Move them until they move easily. Clean top sash.
Step two. lower the (outermost) sash. Clean.
Step three: removing the storm window screen. Raise the lower storm sash until you get past the little divot that lets you lift it out. Then lower the upper window storm sash until you can do the same. The screen lifts inward.
Clean and put back in reverse order.
Just one of those little art forms that gets lost in the rush of vinyl replacements. I never had to do this job as a kid. Now it’s taken me 3 years to figure it out. But I am glad to. We love our old-style wooden windows: we just want them clean!
I hope this is ‘light duty’; you and Jane don’t need to strain anything while healing 🙂
Our old style louver-and-screen system is much easier to deal with, the main drawback is a tendency for the lever that opens and closes the louvers to pop its rivets if the louvers get sticky. OTOH, the windows aren’t particularly sealable. I’m sure a good amount of our a/c leaks out through them and dust comes in, but replacing all the louvered windows isn’t in the budget.
I intervened:she was (with her sore hands, which are swollen so badly she can hardly close them, and ices them morning and night) in there trying to use a rose clippers to cut a 1/2 inch wooden dowel to use as a window prop.
Oh my….at hobby shops, you can buy the small saws that are called “razor” saws, from their shapes. In model railroading, we use them to cut track, plastic stuff, scenery items, etc., They are a lot easier to use than a full-blown carpenter’s saw, and cut better than a coping saw. The rose clippers, besides getting dulled from the dowel, can cause the dowel to splinter.
Tell Jane that “Mr. Natural sez the job goes easier when you use the right tool!” Gosh, that goes back to my first college days with the underground comix. I won’t say R. Crumb is a genius, but some of his stuff is funny. Okay, back to the real world….
Ice is good, just don’t overdo it, and if she can, elevate her hands as often as possible, and if she has a means of compressing her hands and wrist after icing them down, use them.
Now I know why she hasn’t posted on her blog lately.
Speedy recovery to you both!
Yep: we have a) 2 hacksaws b) a wallboard saw c)a regular hand-saw d)a dremel e) a finishing saw f) a Skilsaw g) a jigsaw and h) a scroll saw…and she goes after it with rose clippers. Not even the ratcheting rose clippers (which I haven’t seen since we moved)…but nay! rose clippers!
The good news is…we are now masters of the wooden windows and storm windows. Oil. We need a can of it. We have 5 wooden windows, and now, by golly, they’re going to get painted (exterior) and cleaned (interior) and maintained.
Any post with the word “hacksaw” is an immediate attention grabber. Even more so than words like “Reber Mozart Marzipan Kugel…”
Re: Lubricating window sashes
Sad to say your sashes will be hard to lift again pretty fast. Next time use candle wax. Works for years and years.
Phil Brown
Good idea. Since they’re aluminum tracks, not so bad, but candle wax would be better, for sure!
Or even better, as Master Emuin would say, “Beeswax! None of your tallow!”
Oh, this brings back memories of a 1916 Craftsman Bungalow I restored/rennovated in California twenty years ago. Eleven double hung windows, all individually built so no two were exactly the same. All of the rope cords were badly frayed or broken and needed replacement. 80+ years of paint – some painted closed, others not. I found an article – I think it was in Fine Woodworking – on how to disassemble and rebuild. I did all of them! The artistry and finesse of the builders still amazes me. And the glass, melted sand poured on water, with that old glass shimmer and wave.
I now live in a 1939 row house where a previous owner replaced the original double hung wood windows with no-brand vinyl clads. And dream of those double hungs.
According to my chemistry teacher in high school, glass is actually a supercooled liquid, which accounts for the fact that very old windows will show a definite difference in thickness between the top of the pane and the bottom. Sometimes, the glass can literally flow to the point it leaves a gap between the sash and the top of the pane. The house I grew up in had windows like that until long after I moved away, then my parents replaced the windows with new ones.
We love the wooden windows—which you can still buy, btw! But we don’t have cords: it’s that aluminum track on either side. But I tried to do one too many, and the one in my room now has the storm glass stuck. I’m going to have to do some serious furniture moving to get in there and clean, not to mention revarnish.
When I was a kid, —my mother was for scrubbing floors to the seams with the walls; and baseboards and sills had to be restained and varnished periodically. So I learned to do a serious clean, and to do sills. Oh, did I do sills. And these really, really, really need it, by anybody’s standards.
I admit to replacing my old windows with vinyl ones. Of course, I only had 1985 aluminum windows, so it wasn’t an artistic statement. And I am really enjoying the energy savings (slightly decreased by having to leave the window to the cat run open, I admit). At some point I may try and figure out how to get something more weather-proof in that window that I can still put a cat door in. I’ve been thinking plexiglass, but it is a huge window, side-slider, and I’m thinking that the plexi will not be self-supporting at the thickness that will fit in the window track. It is a puzzlement!
I’ve seen custom glass mounts with a pet door already in the bottom. They get dropped into one side of your door or window and act as a new frame.
As Chondrite says, if you search on “sliding window pet door” in your search engine of choice you get quite a few options. I can’t vouch for them (we went the brute force route and took out one small pane of our glass door to fit our cat flap), but there seem to be plenty of options if you have a couple of hundred dollars to spend.
I have looked into the sliding pet doors, but have the problem that it would be a custom size, and it needs to be offset from the edge where it would normally go, since the cat run has a 6-inch or so wire fence edge along the back. Which means making it even more custom. Right now I just have a pet door fit into the screen window, but that does mean either cooling/heating the outside world, or else having the AC/Furnace off in the day, which is what I generally do.
@philosopher77. Have you thought about placing an insulated box (essentially a foyer) with an additional pet door flap that would provide an “air gap” that would cut down on the transfer of conditioned air. This box could be inside your house. After all Trinket deserves to be comfortable as she mends.
Our terrible aluminum frame windows have come out and been replaced in the old house. While I am sad to see the wooden windows go in the new house, the E-glass windows are amazing – I can stand in front of one on a 106F day like we had last week and touch the glass and it isn’t hot. A friend was afraid my plants would die or at least fail to thrive because of the E glass, but that’s not been a problem.
This house, though, is only 50 years old and we weren’t exactly sacrificing artisan quality wood work with the windows.
Mmm, could you simply have a glass company cut a piece of glass precisely for the door mount? Then you’d only have to slip that pane in.
My double hungs were especially worth saving. The house had been built with first growth Douglas Fir; not possible to replace today. I had to carefully find wood within the house (kitchen cabinet shelves which had been painted) to match the tight grain patterns and coloration when I need to replace pieces. Now I am trying to find someone to replace some of the panes in the French Doors…my last tenants cracked a few of the panes and the property manager says I need to replace before renting again (liability issues). Unfortunately, I can’t make the trip this summer due to work demands or I would try to do it myself.
I’ve never had a cat door, I keep them inside. Cassie is too old at 19+ and Sylvester had been de-clawed before I acquired him (who spends the money to declaw a cat and then abandons the cat???)so I can’t offer any advise on that subject!
After I wrote about Cassie last night, I noticed she was distress purring and wheezing; held her most of the night and took her into the vet this morning. She’d lost a lot of weight since her last visit, wasn’t keeping food down, so I made the difficult, but humane, decision to euthanize her. She was so trusting as I held her during the procedure. I may not be recollecting this correctly, but I think it was Collette that said our best friends come with four feet. Sylvester has been prowling the house, meowing…he knows she’s missing.
Oh, I am so sorry.
I’m sorry for your loss.
I’m so sorry to hear that, berylkit. I am dreading the day I have to make that decision for Trink.
@berylkit…so sorrry for the death of Cassie….give Sylvester an extra hug.
@berylkit. So sorry for your loss. The hardest decision I ever made was to euthanize my namesake in February. The house is so much lonelier without her greetings, and snuggles, and playtime frolics.
so sorry berylkit.
I want to thank everyone for their kind words.