As any home owner knows (unless you have a brand new home) there is always something to fix. My house was built in 1961 and has the original wood cedar double hung single pain windows with exterior alu framed screes / storm units. I had the house insulated a couple years back and at the time the contractor was getting certified for air sealing by the state so we had a state inspector on site during the work and I got the home air sealed for free and the contractor had the state inspector on hand to watch there work and in the end certify them.
As part of the work the inspector looked at my windows and using his fancy IR camera determined that although my windows were old from an energy stand point and a sealing stand point there were well above the standards of current code. As he put it other than improving operation replacement windows would not do much good from an energy standpoint. So as a result of this I have been rehabbing my old wood windows one at a time sealing them as well as adding insulation.
The rehab can be as simple as removing the storm unit, scraping priming and painting to glass replacement (I am finding a lot of cracked pains). The exterior trim in many cases is rotted where it meets the sills and in about a half dozen cases there is significant sill rot.
Well this weekend I sucked it up and tackled my first sill replacement. Other than having to take the casements out of the frame window units everything so far has gone to plan. All the parts and pieces I need are off the shelf in the millwork section of my local HomeDepo. The best part is that I only have to remove one piece of interior trim (at the sill). Everything else stays in place. This means that it is for all intensive purposes all the work occurs from the outside. My wife particularly likes this.
One of the things I learned is YouTube can be a HUGE help. I swear that there is a video on there for everything. Watching several videos of sill replacements I learned a trick to the removal. That is to take my Multi-max took and cut the sill in the middle at an angle. You can then get a pry bar in the cut and the sill just pulls out in two pieces. Since they are stapled in to the frame the staples just slide out of the ends of the sill
Another thing I learned is that having a good quality table saw is by far the most useful tool. It can cut perfect angles and notches in things and you end up with quality finished cuts. Being I had to cut and notch the new sill to size (and I wanted it to be perfect) I was nerves but it turned out to be painless.
At the end of the day if I do a complete rehab of a window I found that I am spending about $75 / window. If I have to a piece of glass it jumps to about $100. Many of the windows are costing less than $25. Since my windows appear to be custom sized/made millwork pieces of oiled cedar replacements are in the $250 range (for cheap ones). Yes I am probably spending 2x that if I was to bill for my labor but it is cool that in the end I can take a completely run down poorly functioning window and when I am done it works and looks like new. Although the rehab / replacement and re sealing is nice. I found that rebuilding the tracks and the springs that balance the windows ahs the most dramatic effect. When I am done the windows will slide up with one finger and down with two fingers.
