I stumbled upon an article on the Spartacus Educational website this morning about the JFK assassination and realized I was looking at the deepest of rabbit holes—a better organized rabbit hole than that of Wikipedia—which is saying something. There’s a ton of stuff to dig into there, on a site whose design dates back to about 2002, which is oddly comforting.
One of the things I’ve loved about this leaky, creaky house we’ve called home are the warlbledy wooden windows it came with. Apart from the panes that have obviously been replaced due to baseball impact or misadventure, they all have the lovely bubbles, waves, and imperfections that mark century-old glass. Unfortunately, they also suffer from a fatal design flaw: The weight pocket on each side of each window is an open cavity which leaches our warm air outside.
Today I finally got the chance to install two Pullman window counterbalances, the first of what I hope are the solution to this problem. I’ve had them since early December but haven’t had the time to put them in. Here’s how I did it.
Seen here is what I have to deal with throughout the house: wooden casements hung with rope and pulley. Some are rope and some are chain; some windows have a mixture, and some casements have been opened to reattach the weights.
First things first.
I scored and pulled the sash stop molding off the window, exposing the whole front of the window and the nails securing the metal guide on each side. After I carefully pulled the nails along the front side of the guide on each side, I was able to coax the entire bottom sash forward, away from the casement, and put the guides to the side. After some convincing, I was then able to pull the rope out of the channel on either side of the sash (each side was secured with a toothed flooring nail, difficult to remove) and put the sash aside.
Now, here’s the first roadblock. As with everything else in this house, nothing is easy. Lots of other windows I’ve seen have had pulleys installed with visible and accessible screws for simple replacement. Why should ours be similar? As you can see above, there was nothing on the outside of the pulley that hinted at how to remove it. After some exploratory prying and bending, I was able to remove the left-side pulley and found that it was designed to be pounded in with a hammer at the factory, and held in place with teeth on the top and bottom.
Knowing this, it was then simple to bend the top and bottom of the casing and insert a long screwdriver to bend the teeth back. After that, the second pulley popped right out.
Of course, the hole left behind wasn’t large enough to fit the new pulleys, so I had to enlarge them vertically. I made three holes with a drill bit and then used a shiny new 7/8″ wood chisel bought specially for this job to clean up the hole. I did some test fitting for the body of the pulley and then chiseled out a mortise to countersink it flush to the casement. It’s ugly, but with a coat of paint, it’ll clean up well—I have to figure out how to make a rounded mortise with the next one.
Fun with fibers
Next was the boring part. Knowing I wasn’t going to pull the wooden molding off each window, I needed to find a way to get insulation into the cavity. These days, it’s possible to rent a machine and blow fiber insulation into your own attic (why anyone would want to do this themselves is a mystery to me) so I knew I could find the fiber on the consumer market. After some searching, I found it at at the local HD in a 20-pound bag, with the brand name Green Fiber. The nice thing about this stuff is that there’s no fiberglas in it, which makes it easy to work with. I made a wide funnel with some paper, taped it to the casement, and spent the next twenty minutes stuffing insulation into each cavity.
I predrilled holes and put both pulleys into place. From here, it was the reverse of what I’d started with: I attached each pulley tape to the channel of the sash with a sturdy wood screw, then slid each metal guide into the channel on the sides of the sash. Carefully guiding the whole thing back into the casement, I nailed the guides back into place and replaced the blind stop.
And there you have it. The window is in place, and the tape is just about perfect for a counterbalance—I’d say another added pound of pressure on each side would be perfect. It’s too warm outside right now to determine if it’s actually insulating or not, but we’re getting back down below freezing later this week. Total installation time was about 3 hours, but I could probably get that down to 2, maybe an hour and a half, if I could find a good fast way to get the insulation into the cavity. I’m going to do a test with my shop vac on reverse to see how well it might work (and how messy it might get). At $25/pair, window pulleys are a much cheaper alternative to replacing each window with vinyl, so I’m hopeful it will work.
I stumbled on this old link about window sash balances, which are spring-loaded pulleys that replace counterweights so that the weight pocket can be filled and insulated for winter weather. Our windows are drafty, and I believe that once they are properly insulated we would save a ton of money in heating bills. Now, to weigh one of our windows and order…
This is a Windows-only article on sharing one iTunes library among many networked machines. I’m sure there’s a Mac version of this out there somewhere, but I don’t have it handy right now.
How to run Windows and Mac apps side-by-side with Parallels. This may come in handy in a couple of days…
Why is it that all the motorcycles sold on Craigslist in this area are crotch-rocket ego bikes worth more than my Jeep? All I want is a decent, running Honda CB350, or even a mid-70’s R60. Sheesh.
If I ever get paid, and actually have money in the bank (gasp), this is a partial list of Stuff I’d Like To Buy:
- The birthday present I have picked out for my wife
- Life insurance
- A pair of dress chinos so that I don’t look like a bumbling hick on our client meeting next week
- A new pair of dress shoes to replace the 5-year-old Steve Madden knockoffs I currently own
- A pair of prescription sunglasses to replace the ones I lost in the taxi on the way to our hotel in Rome two years ago
- A set of iPod headphones to replace the ones I’ve got, which are fraying, cracked, and dynamically mismatched
- The ability to finally subscribe to satellite radio, putting the unit we’ve had since December to use
- Extra RAM, a new battery, and a CD-burner for the Thinkpad, which needs to be backed up
Supposedly, there’s a FedEx package on its way with my name on it. If it ever does arrive, I’ll be able to pay 1/2 my upcoming tax bill, the August mortgage, and at least some of my outstanding bills.
Broken Windows Theory. From the Boston Globe as well. I find this theory fascinating. There’s good info here-more reading to be done. (via)
*** STOP: 0x00000077 (0x00000000, 0x8175A800, 0xBFCFDCA0)
KERNEL_STACK_INPAGE_ERRORBeginning dump of physical memory
Physical memory dump complete. Contact your system administrator or
technical support group.
Looks like we’re probably (but not definitely) grounded by the storm, so we most likely won’t be going to Houston tomorrow. Dammit. I was really looking forward to meeting the Masso clan and watching our friend JP get hitched (and getting out of town, for that matter.) Sorry, friend. Luckily Southwest has a pretty cool cancellation/refund policy, so we may be able to get our dinero back, or at least get a credit for a future flight.
In other news, that company I ordered plaster washers from, and who sent me a confirmation email, has no record of the order I placed. When the dude on the phone told me this, I hung up in disgust, but will most likely have to call back and place an order over the phone to make sure it goes through. What a hassle.
(Update: Some dude called the house and mumbled something about not having me in their system because the order already went out, or something stupid like that. So I guess the stuff is on its way.)
I was one of the last retards out on the roads this afternoon, picking up some final things before heading home; I got food, beer, and clean-burning propane. I’m going to go dig out my camping gear and dust off the portable grill, just in case. We already have large tree limbs down in the back yard (as well as next to the Scout) and the power has blinked off about four times already—thank god for laptops.
Remember everyone, tomorrow is Talk Like A Pirate Day. Yarrrr!
As I get older I’m affected more and more by cold weather. The prospect of taking the dog out for a well-deserved walk fills me with dread. Our 100-year-old house is one large draft covered by a roof; there are few places it’s easy to remain toasty without sitting under a pile of blankets. I’ve spent twenty years attempting to fill cracks, upgrade windows, add insulation, improve heating, and plug holes, but it still has little effect. My hands become icicles in October and don’t thaw until April. I lose all contact with my toes sometime around Thanksgiving and pray it returns for my birthday. This is partially due to my age and partially to my body type; I lose heat quickly even on warm days, and it’s only gotten worse since my 40th birthday.
A couple of years ago I found a couple of long-sleeve shirts on the rack at our local thrift store and grabbed them up; among them was an Under Armour shirt I wound up wearing a lot because the sleeves didn’t shrink after the first wash. This has been one of my pet peeves for years: I buy a longsleeve shirt and after two runs through the wash the cuffs only come down to the middle of my forearms (Gilden, Champion, I’m looking at you). The Under Armour shirt held up well and didn’t shrink, so I started looking for them specifically on our visits. A year or so after that I found another, which said “ColdGear” on the tag. Intrigued, I tried it on, and found it was skin-tight, but felt warm, so I spent $6 on it.
What I found after wearing it on cold days was that it did keep me warm—far better than other shirts I’ve tried, and much more comfortable than multiple layers. It kept my upper core warm during snowboard trips, frigid junkyard runs, shoveling snow, and walking Hazel. So much so that I took my jacket off and stuffed it into my backpack the last time we went snowboarding. On subsequent thrifting visits, I found more of them, and stocked up for cold weather. They take some getting used to; I’m not normally a skin-tight kind of guy. After a day, they irritate my surgery scar—almost as much as wearing a fleece with a full zipper—but the warmth is worth it.
The next issue has been my feet. They only have two temperatures: sweating and freezing. They know no middle ground; they are as impossible to regulate as an overtired toddler on a candy binge. Any socks I have ever worn make my feet sweat, making the socks damp. In the winter, they will then freeze over into solid ice; in the summer they become a fetid swamp. This also limits the kind of shoes I can wear. Any shoe with lots of fabric padding inside will become intolerable within weeks. I’ve found that Nike running shoes made of thin webbing are the best summer shoes; meanwhile I have a pair of leather Keen shoes that are at least 15 years old I wear almost exclusively in the winter. The soles have been reglued twice; I will weep when they finally fall apart.
It comes down to the socks. I wore cotton socks for years, but they were no good. Even looking at polyester socks made my feet sweat. Some of the blends worked better than others; Timberland makes a sock I’ve been wearing for a couple of years that seems to work for fall and spring. A couple of Christmases ago, my sister got me a pair of SmartWool socks and these became the go-to for winter. I wore that pair so much, I bought a couple more on sale.
Over the Thanksgiving break, I used these as my base layers along with a pair of bike tights for the junkyard run I made. I also had the good fortune of borrowing a set of insulated Wellington boots from my brother in law, which made a huge difference. It got to the point where I had stripped down to my jeans and fleece. Bike tights are pretty good, but I think I’m going to buy a pair of ColdGear leggings for our next snowboard trip.