Rear Window

We replaced a window. Yippee, I know.

The upstairs guest room has a triangular window, like all the rooms upstairs. We're not entirely sure whether it's original to the house, but it's certainly old. It's also glazed with Plexiglas, not real glass, so it was probably broken and rebuilt and some point. The wooden frame is old beat-up redwood, but we don't know how old.

More to the point, it's drafty and ill-fitting. We've tried all sorts of cheap hardware-store rubber moldings to stop the drafts, but nothing worked very well. And we wanted to take the hard plastic out anyway.

Enter Ocean Woodworks, a local woodworking shop that specializes in restorations and custom milling. What started out as a simple "fix up this old window, please" eventually became, "let's build an entire new window from scratch."

They took a ton of measurements to get the dimensions of the triangular frame just right. It's got a lot of tricky compound angles to make the bottom sill shed water but also allow the window to open inwards into the room. There are no hinges or latches anywhere holding it in. It's just a gravity fit. Measuring didn't work, so they came back and built a full-size cardboard template. That didn't work, either, so they came back 2-3 more times to trim and adjust the template, and still spent a couple of hours with hand planes, chisels, and sandpaper tweaking the final product to fit. In place of my nasty rubber strips they made kerf-cut trim with copper flanges to seal around the edges. Nice.

Now it's a completely new reproduction of the original(?) window, but with UV-resistant glass and a nearly draft-free fit. We did manage to save the little wooden mullions between the lights, but apart from those it's all new. They gave us back the original frame, but I have no idea what we're going to do with it. Anybody want most of a triangular window?