Okay, Now Where Do We Put Them?

Bon Jour

Windows and doors cost a fortune, and they’re all terrible. Got it.

No, no, that‘s not what I meant to say. The windows are fine, really, and I’m sure you’re smart enough to avoid the pitfalls.

Now there’s two ways to look at these things. For example, let’s look at vinyl siding. I’ve told you I don’t like it, and wouldn’t live in a house that was encrusted with it. Plenty of people share my sentiments. Many don’t, as a cursory look out the window in the car reveals. (By the way, my vinyl friends, no matter what the salesman told you, I can tell it’s vinyl at ten thousand yards, and I can barely read the road signs)

But I understand vinyl siding. People couldn’t get a straight answer about painting their house. Why does it peel? Why can’t I find someone to paint it? Do you really expect me to climb that ladder every four years and fight the bees and scrape that shingle? The football game’s on! Both the vinyl installer and the painter have a parole officer, but the vinyl guy only comes once.

And so, people who value neatness, and haven’t the funds to hire someone or the Wallenda gene for ladders, choose vinyl. Different strokes, as they say. I might suggest you might be happier with masonry of some sort, but what’s done is done.

My questions are different. I ask: “Can I paint it?” not “Do I have to paint it?” I know from long experience that something that requires regular maintenance can be rejuvenated. And it will last much, much, longer than something that is very durable, but can’t be refreshed. Paint is a sacrificial layer, and one that can add color, and texture, and you can change if need be. I’ve painted 275 year old windows, still going strong. They were surrounded by the vinyl siding of their day, weathered shingles. The shingles were over a hundred years old, and weathered to a lovely color you couldn’t ever mimic. I assure you, “permanent” things like vinyl siding won’t last that long. It seems counterintuitive, but the stuff sold as “the last thing you’ll ever need” is really disposable. It’s that stuff you have to take care of that lasts forever.

And with windows and doors, there are two ways of looking at it too, in general. There’s the hi-tech approach, and the old fashioned approach. I’ve taken both, at one time or another. What’s the diff?

Go to a window showroom, and they’ll lay the hi-tech jargon on you. Low-E glass, hermetically sealed glass, with a vacuum between the sheets, or perhaps argon gas in there if you want to impress your neighbors. Space shuttle rubber for weatherstripping- Check.

You can still buy old-fashioned windows. They’re really not old-fashioned. They are made of wood, and can be painted or stained, but they have modern jambs or crank hardware, locks, and weatherstripping.

The best windows I’ve ever seen are on the front of my home. They are true divided light windows, 12 over twelve, wood, in wood frames. You can tilt them in to paint them or wash them, and they don’t slam on your fingers like old windows use to, but in all respects they are the real deal. They get their requisite energy efficiency by the installation of a glass panel, which is routed into and fitted to each sash panel on the exterior side with a few clips. You can get the glass with low-E coatings, which protect the interior contents from damaging UV rays, while reflecting the hot sun in the summer, but not the winter. Don’t ask how it knows; it’s like your thermos, it just knows.

If someone tosses an errant baseball, and breaks a panel and a pane, you can remove a panel from an adjacent window and cover the broken pane. The exterior side of the muntins has old fashioned putty glazing holding the window panes in, but because the putty is inside the glass, and protected from the elements, it doesn’t degrade like it does when exposed to the weather; mine are over ten years old, and haven’t required repainting yet. The exterior side of the sash frames can be painted by tilting the windows in, and running a brush around them. Easy.
The windows are wonderful in use, because they allow you to grab any of the muntin bars and operate the window. Sooner or later, either you or your children try that with the fake muntin bars, and make kindling out of them. And they have a real depth to them, and throw real shadows and reflect the light, and look authentic and fine.

The rest of the windows on the house are of the more usual vacuum sealed double pane glass variety. About a third of these “low maintenance” windows now feature a fogged sash, as the seals didn’t last, while the “high maintenance” windows are just getting warmed up on their three or four hundred year run. The “permanent” ones didn’t all last ten years. And they can’t be rejuvenated in any cost effective way. The whole sash has to go.

So pick your poison, and let’s get on with it. Where do we locate them? How many do we want?
I’ll try to make this simple:

-Don’t leave any room you enter, bathrooms and walk in closets included, without a window.

-Don’t put skylights in your bathroom. Ever.

-Don’t put a big window in your bath over the tub. I don’t care how secluded your yard is, you won’t bathe in front of it anyway. Even women who dance around a pole are generally wearing a thong. I doubt you’re more of an exhibitionist than them. And no matter how many ads you see for towering vaulted bathrooms with skylights, it’s always a bad idea. No amount of ventilation and lighting is going to fix it, either. Trust me, I’ve talked to hundreds of people after they’ve lived in their homes for a few years. It’s always, always, a bad, bad, idea.

-Surprisingly, a window over your bathroom sink is pleasant. It’s nice to look out the window at the birds and flowers while you’re brushing your teeth. Put the mirror off to one side,or on a stand on the countertop. No one ever seems to do this though. They do often put the window over the toilet, which I don’t get; facing either way, it’s no use to me.

-Don’t light any room you want to stay in for any amount of time from one side only. Light means natural light, by the way. Two adjacent walls is great, three is superb, but hard to come by. Four is weird and disorienting.

-If you can’t get windows into adjacent walls, the room will be harder to fenestrate, and requires a lot of thought. Gang windows together, put transoms over them too, and raise the ceiling height some, if you can. Paint the walls lighter colors to try to get that light as deep in there as you can and bouncing around. A real big mirror on the wall opposite the windows can help too. Look, I’m warning you, this is the most common mistake in housing today. A bedroom with a window on one wall is a prison cell. Don’t do it.

-If at all possible, in almost any clime in the USA, orient your house to face the southeast. That’s where the light is. In the winter, where I am, it’s your only hope. If your house can’t face that way, get the windows working as much as possible in that direction.

-Put a window you can see out next to, or in, the door where people call. Read my rant about having a door people can find to call at in my snout house rant.

-If you seek privacy in a room, like facing a busy street or too close to your neighbor’s house, use bands of monitor windows to get light in the room, and a view of the sky. Monitor windows are bands of horizontally configured windows with a sill no lower than your chin. If you use awning windows for these, you can leave them open in the rain, too.

-Interior glass is a forgotten art. Use transom windows and interior glass, translucent for privacy if need be, to get light into the middle of your house.

-If you live in any climate that requires heating for any portion of the year, don’t put windows right over your bed. This is a common fad these days. Skylights are pretty bad too. In heating seasons, room air hits the glass, cools, and heads to the floor. This is what is commonly termed “a draft.” This is not desirable. Put the windows on each side of the bed instead, and the breeze will come in in the summer, and you won’t feel like you’re sleeping in the bottom of a Siberian mineshaft in the winter. And if you want to gaze at the stars while in bed, put a window or skylight on the opposite side of your room from the bed, not right over it. Last time I checked though, you did very little stargazing while you were asleep. File the “stargazing window” over the bed under “goofy ideas.”

-Every stairwell needs natural light, at every landing. The big window on the second storey over the doorway in a stairwell is there for a reason. The stairwell is usually hard to light from the back end, it generally ends smack dab in the middle of the house. So use the advice for rooms with windows on one side. Skylights are superb here, generally. Designers are getting better at this, in general.

-Don’t buy great big sheets of glass. Gang smaller units together.

-Use windows to frame views. Huge expanses of glass gaping at the landscape makes even spectacular views into a kind of wallpaper. The Mona Lisa has a frame. Your ocean view should too.

-Don’t use sliding glass doors for any door you use often. Think of them as windows with a really low sill that you can climb out of. That’s about how convenient and easy to use they are, no more.

-A regular door at the top of your cellar stairs instead of a bulkhead is a luxury you should spring for.

-Insulated metal doors are cheap and durable. Use them for your high traffic areas. Choose a formal entry door made from real wood. It will get less use, but you’ll feel like a squire when you can turn away the Jehovah’s Witnesses and hear the door close with that satisfying thunk, the one that says: “…and stay out”

What About the Windows?

When a house is being constructed, there comes a day when it’s ready for the doors and windows. The roof is on, generally, or at least sheathed and papered. No siding yet. But the framing, except perhaps interior partitions, is done. The doors and windows are expensive, sometimes the most expensive single outlay for a house, so they’re rarely stored on the site during construction. When you’re ready, they bring them, and you try mightily to put them all right in the framed holes that very day. When they’re in, the house is said to be “tight to the weather,’ and the contractor is happy that his crew can work under the roof if it rains and the house can be locked up at night, at least enough to keep honest people out. Your house looks like a house now.

That’s quite a laundry list of benefits, and you don’t even live there yet. For something so important, and expensive as the windows and doors, you’d think they’d given more attention.

In today’s rant, I have to talk about subtlety again. Sorry. You thought you were off the hook after we covered paint, and we could talk about things that require hammers again.

Look, there’s lots of things in your house, and they affect you deeply, sometimes so you can notice, others in ways that you can’t quite put your finger on, but they annoy you just the same, and they cause most of the endless tinkering I see people doing to their homes, trying to solve the same problems over and over again.

For example: You want to watch entertainment on a screen. You wish to have a place to do so, that can accommodate you and the furniture and necessary equipment. And you tinker with the rooms you have, and then add room after room, until your house touches the neighbor’s houses on all four sides, and is four stories tall, trying to find a place to do it. Your formal living room was too small. You couldn’t dodge around the furniture, and got tired of cracking your shin on the coffee table, and the windows behind the couch always seemed to reflect on the screen, so you made it a dungeon with curtains, and then it was too depressing a room to stay in, and you cast a longing look at that vaulted family room off the kitchen, there’s a TV in there already, let’s try again. And you have more room for the furniture and equipment, but you get tired of the dishwasher noise, and you can’t make out the dialog in the movies because the acoustics are terrible, and the sliding glass doors make glare ten times worse than the living room had, so you get blinds for them, but the dog is always whacking at them to get out, and you’re constantly having to fix them and clean them, and you think, I’ll build an addition. But it’s just another version of the same thing, only now the windows are behind the screen, facing you, and the sun’s in your eyes. Or something.

You try the basement. Bang Bang Bang. No glare. Privacy’s nice. Kinda cold in the winter, though, and the concrete under the carpet is tough on your ankles. And after the third time you rip out the carpet when the basement floods, you try again somewhere else. And so on.

The best houses avoid problems, and additions add to the sum of the dwelling, they don’t try to address the same problems over and over. You can save yourself a lot of problems by intelligent design, suited to your lifestyle, and starting with a house that has the bones that allows you to make it your own, and not be an uphill battle the whole way.

The easiest way to make rooms in your house unlivable is to botch the windows and doors. Get them wrong, and Martha Stewart, Norm Abram, Frank Lloyd Wright and Harry Potter won’t be able to fix the rooms for you. And many times, the reason for your dislike for certain rooms will be subtle, as I mentioned, and you’ll waste a lot of blood and treasure trying to fix them, and never know why you still find yourself avoiding them.

I live in a colonial house. That means certain things. For windows, it means that the widow glass is divided up into panes. Some of my windows really are divided light windows, and some mimic the look with muntins that snap in the frames.

Of all the crimes against windows, the bizarre nature of false muntins is the worst.

Let’s reject any window with flat aluminum grids sandwiched between the sheets of glass right off. They look like a prison window, even from fifty yards away. A pleasant house is not a prison, unless you’re Martha Stewart. The muntins, even if they’re false, are there to look picturesque. Steel grids between the sheets of glass cannot be picturesque. Don’t do it. Cased closed.

The main reason colonial houses had windows with small panes of glass, is that glass was expensive, and big pieces of glass were either unavailable or crazy expensive. So window sash dimensions were based on multiples of fairly standard sizes of relatively small glass panes. 6×8 inches, 7×9, 8×8,8×12, and if you’re rich, and needed stately windows back then, perhaps you could afford 9×12, set in bigger frames.

Now, you could get various proportions of height to width by varying how many panes a sash held, like 6 over 6 (very common,) or 12 over 12, and so forth. Vary the height to width even further by having 9 panes over 6, or 6 over nine, or 8 over 12, and so forth.

Nowadays, you can get glass any size you want. There’s no controlling factor for the dimensions. Windows are chosen without regard to proportion, and then divided up willy nilly by clip on, between glass, or applied muntins. And they look bizarre, if you know how strange the proportions are, and even if you don’t, they are the kind of subtle detail that you might miss, but affects you nonetheless. The windows look really squat, or too tall, or the panes look wrong in number, and the effect cuts up the view in disturbingly proportioned boxes. The worst offender is when the false panes in a really wide window are wider than they are tall, and you feel like you’re in a funhouse.

In general nowadays, the capstone to this foolishness is using a brickmould for the exterior frame, in a shingled or clapboarded house. The thin, 2-1/2 wide moulding brings the siding right up to the sashes, and the house looks like a face with the eyebrows shaved off. The windows are like holes punched into the siding, as they would be if they were in a masonry wall, but are vaguely weird looking, like a black eye in a deep socket. Builders save a few pennies on the 4 inch frame that should surround the window, and tell you it’s low maintenance because there’s no frame to paint. It’s not worth it. Don’t do it.

Now mistakes like these are essentially unfixable. Even if you noticed the difference and wanted to change things, you’re not going to rip out the most expensive items in your house and start over. Even if you did, the window opening is still the same (badly proportioned) size. It’s got to be right from the get go.

When choosing windows, determine a pane size, even if the panes will be false, and stick to it. Use appropriate multiples of the panes to get windows of various sizes and shapes, but that will look like they all belong in the same house. If your home isn’t of the colonial variety, the windows are still based on a proportional system of some sort. Have your designer find out what it is, and stick to it. It’s actually easier to specify windows if you can just extrapolate everything from one pane size, than it is to simply look at the window catalog, and the hundreds of available dimensions, and wonder how tall and wide each should be.

Tomorrow:

Okay, Now Where Do We Put Them?

Beware Home Depot

Hello all.

Please don’t get me wrong. I adore Home Depot, and its Blue counterpart Lowe’s. A cottage industry has sprung up ascribing various malevolent forces at work in big box stores, ranging from denuding the rainforests to destroying all small businesses. I don’t see it. It’s just a big store where you buy useful things.

Big box stores are a supremely handy tool. But all tools have a function. Using a tool for things that they’re not designed for leads to bad outcomes. And a fetish for Home Depot has ruined many a home. To paraphrase their advertising: You can do it. But they can’t help.

I’ve renovated hundreds of houses over the years. And the most successful renovations, and the ones that add the most value to the property, are the ones that involve houses that have been neglected. Really. Because neglect is preferable to hamfisted remodeling, or remuddling as we call it in the industry, which expends resources but doesn’t increase value.

You scan the real estate listings. You see a house, barely recognizable behind and under the vinyl siding, and the pressure treated, well, everything, the plastic detailing in a cornucopia of styles, all foreign to the original structure. But in there somewhere was a house with good bones. Someone spent all the money necessary to make it valuable again, but they squandered it. That doesn’t mean they’re going to sell the house for what it’s worth minus their mistakes. It means it will be listed as “move in condition” or “recently updated” or my favorite: “pristine.” Pristine is one of those real estate ad words that the writer has no idea what it means, like calling ranches “colonial.”

What it means, really, is the bracketed cornice over each window has been hacked off to make room for cheap plastic replacement windows, with badly proportioned rectangles of aluminum masquerading as muntins put in between the sheets of glass to mimic a “colonial” window, but looking like a window in a reform school. . It means the wood front door has been removed because it needed painting every five years, and been replaced with a plastic one with a bizarre” Moorish New Orleans” look to it, that sounds like a refrigerator door instead of giving you that satisfying thunk when you close it.

It means the porch is gone, and replaced with pressure treated everything, even though only the underpinnings that had contact with the ground or concrete needed the rot resistance of pressure treated wood; the whole thing is made from the nasty green stuff, or at least the part that that isn’t made of Trex, which is plastic and sawdust, and looks it. And the railing spindles are only available in two styles: a bastard version of a William and Mary post, or a modern looking square section that looks out of place on almost everything. Don’t get me started on the spindle spacing and proportions.

Inside, there’s rubber flooring, and wood carpeting, and plastic everything. The tile is simultaneously gaudy and bland, because there’s too much of it laid in no particular pattern that makes sense. It’s got a cheesy sawdust and glue particleboard boxes wrapped in woodgrain paper for all of its cabinetry. There’s an expensive, permanent granite countertop atop the disposable cabinetry. There’s a lot of unexplained interior wrought iron, everywhere except where you might have found it in a real colonial: the hardware. There are ceiling fans everywhere, like we all live in Casablanca. In short, there’s a bewildering mish-mash of styles, materials, colors, proportions, and patinas, and you’re stuck with them.

This week’s circular from the big orange box has a big splash page touting metallic interior paint. Take it from someone who has credentials going back to the 1970s in faux finishes: a gallon of metallic paint in the hands of an amateur is a very dangerous thing.

It really would be “pristine” if it still had peeling paint on the clapboards, and plank flooring with water stains all over them. I can fix those problems. I can’t fix vinyl siding, if I don’t want it. I can only tear it off and throw it away.

There’s plenty of good stuff at the big box stores, but it’s all mixed in with everything else. And most of the “bad” stuff is good for something, too, it’s just used badly, or in the wrong place. I’m not arguing against different strokes for different folks, it’s incongruity, slipshod design and execution, and unintentional gaudiness or barrenness I’ve got a problem with.

I’ve used the box stores both as a homeowner and a contractor. And I see people wandering around in there, looking at everything quizzically, and about to ask a clerk a question that would better be answered by Martha Stewart or Norm Abram. And I know that they’re going to do awful things to their house. The materials can’t tell you what to do. And the saleshelp are going to point you to the gaudiest thing, every time. You have to know what to do, what you’re after, before you go there, or you’re going to get into trouble.

I love the big boxes because I can go in there, and get hook and loop sandpaper, a junction box, nine volt batteries, chalk, paint thinner, fluorescent light bulbs, a pressure treated four by four, a dishwasher, a screen door closer, a handicapped parking sign, and ten or a hundred other odd bits of stuff that construction projects require. They have everything, and it’s inexpensive, relatively.

But the one thing I can’t get is advice. Luckily, I’m not looking for any. Be careful in there, if you are.

Tomorrow:

Green, White, Yellow, Red, Blue

Friday

Hello All.

Sippican will return on Monday, August 8th. Thanks for reading.