If you’ve bought an old house, then sooner or later you will have to deal with the windows. They might have started aging – the bonding agent in the linseed oil paint gets washed away by wind and rain, the putty cracks, the corner irons and screws ru ...
If you’ve bought an old house, then sooner or later you will have to deal with the windows. They might have started aging – the bonding agent in the linseed oil paint gets washed away by wind and rain, the putty cracks, the corner irons and screws rust. But it is by no means certain that the wisest solution is to install new windows.
The fact that we still have windows from the 18th and 19th centuries is partly due to the wood being of such good quality. It often pays to renovate old windows, even for other reasons: they are better suited to the house than new windows, the glass panes are clearer and look more alive than modern glass, and they give the house a more authentic look.
Here you learn, step-by-step, how to go about renovating, restoring and maintaining your old windows – the proper and safe way to take the windows out of the window-frame, mark up all the parts, remove the putty and the old paint, remove the corner irons, clean all the metal parts of rust and old paint, dismantle the frame, repair damaged parts of the frame, put them together again and sandpaper them.
Then it’s time for an undercoat of paint, glass-cutting, fitting the new pane, applying the putty and two coats of paint. Before each stage, you are shown which tools and materials you will need.
Alf Stenbacka, joiner, specialist in repairing traditional buildings, and teacher, and Eva Stenbacka, special-needs teacher with an extensive knowledge of textile and painting materials, jointly purchased an old school a few hours away from Stockholm and started renovating the building and its two hundred or so window frames. Today they arrange courses, give lectures and run a shop where you can buy most of what you need to maintain your windows.