Now that the weather is nice, you may be tempted to do some exterior home improvement projects. You may be looking at the trim on your house and thinking to yourself, “Hmmm. That color looks just a little – shabby.” You may be considering painting said trim just to change the color.
Don’t do it!
Do you want your house windows to look like this forever? Then don’t even think about starting a home repair improvement project that in any way involves windows. Trust me on this.Source: http://www.intertwilight.net/ondes/dirtywindow.jpg
Heed my words. I speak with the authority of sad experience.
Do not paint your trim just because you don’t like the color. That is not a good enough reason to put yourself through the trauma you will suffer in this project.
“But Class Factotum,” you are saying. “It’s just the trim. My house is brick. There’s not that much work involved in painting around the roofline and the windows. Surely you exaggerate.”
No. I do not.
Let me tell you what will happen if you make this bad, bad decision.
You will spend every evening after work scraping the loose paint and then scrubbing the dirt off the wood. This is after you have found someone to lend you an extension ladder, because your regular ladder isn’t tall enough to get you to the eaves. You will consider buying an extension ladder rather than borrowing one once you realize that the project is going to take more than a weekend, but then you will discover that extension ladders cost more than $150. You tell your neighbor you will bake him brownies every week – is that OK?
Then you will make the even stupider decision to remove the storm windows.
Stop!! DO NOT REMOVE THE STORM WINDOWS! If you must persist in this insanity, at least just paint around them. Once you take the storm windows off, all hope is gone. Now you will have to put them back on. And even though they look like they should fit into any of the windows on your house, they will not. Over the 82 years that the storm window and the window frame have been together, they have cleaved and become one. Let nothing put them asunder.
You will break at least one storm window in the process of removing it. This means you will have to find a place that will sell you replacement glass and the little bitty plastic parts that you don’t even know are broken or missing until you try to put that glass back in. No place that sells glass is ever open after 5:00 or on weekends. They are never near your office.
Once all the storm windows are off, you will realize that now there is nothing to prevent someone from opening your windows from the outside and coming into your house. The window locks at the top of the sash don’t work any more, so you spend one panic-filled night before it occurs to you to use your new cordless drill to put a hole in the sash and frame of each window and then stick a long nail in the hole as a simple lock.
Once you are finally ready to paint – after you have pruned the trees that are preventing you from getting to the eaves, you will be thwarted by rain. Wood must dry for at least two days before you paint it. Finding two days in a row in April without rain is not easy.
You will be relieved to have the rain, though, because then you can rest. The prep work has left you completely exhausted. You can reach only about 18” each ascension of the ladder. Do the math for your house. And no, the exercise does not give you a high hiney like it should.
After about a month, you will complete the priming and the actual painting. In the meantime, the neighbor who has lent you the ladder is paying someone else to paint his house. They do no prep work and don’t prime. They charge $2,500. $2,500 to do a bad job of painting a house.
Now it’s time to replace the storm windows – the ones I told you not to remove but did you listen? No and don’t come crying to me now.
You wash the regular windows and the storm windows, then start replacing. You’ll get all but two back on, but the last two will not fit. You try switching out a few, but to no avail. This is where the Big Factotum asks, “Didn’t you number each storm window to go with its regular window?”
You finally surrender and sand the windowsill down an inch so the storm window will fit. The other storm window frame gets hammered into submission.
Then you get the bright idea of sealing the edges of the storm windows. After all, they are supposed to help keep the cold out of the house, right?
Well. The removable sealant costs 50 cents a tube more than the permanent sealant. Why would you ever want to take it off, you ask yourself. You get the permanent stuff and really slather it in there, filling in all the spaces.
It’s not until you have all the windows replaced that you look at them from the inside and realize that they are still dirty.
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