The windows during the restauration

During the restauration/renovation of a window, there is finally the opportunity to look under the layers of paint and that doesn't exclude surprises.

This happens often especially if they haven't been taken care for for a long time, but things that look solid at first glance, but not be real!

Here comes, but a bit scattered, a collection of pictures sent by our carpenter while he was fixing our windows. Some pictures show the "nude" window and its problem, some other shows the reparation made. 

One of the windows, before the first inspection

And after

A close-up

One can guess the damage by looking like this

One of the first "surprises"; but quite to be expected. Some wood that is not really in good state anymore

Not the best state for this piece of wood, probably a "sidostycke", one of the side pieces of the window

Another view of the piece

Not so much left of this "gångjärn"

After removing the "hornjärn", one can see what is left of the wood underneath

This seems mildly better

It doesn't seem like there are many windows that are in good state

Window #5, with "spröjs". Can that piece of wood be saved?

It seems that the combination of modern paint ("plastfärg") and the "hornjärn" has been lethal for most of the windows. 

And more

Another one...

What does this teach us? To not use plastic/water based paint!

They never end

Again

The marks of the "hornjärn"

This window had a couple of nails holding some things together (!!!)

The "hornjärn" on the left is probably the style that is original for our house. But when doing reparation, they often didn't bother to search for the proper pieces and took whatever was available. The one of the left is more modern and probably from the 40s/50s. 

The beauty of finding the original color (sadly a darker red than the one we have picked) under the layers of color. 

Beautiful reparation

Most of the windows required reparations

Seamless work

New "gångjärn" is placed on the new wood

The reparation is minimal and one tries to preserve as much as possible of the original wood

Even some wood that doesn't look healthy is often in better state than it looks

It is important to try to use wood from slow growing trees to guarantee more robustness and quality

After all this work, there is still plenty to do. Mostly painting and putting the putty. 

During winter time

It was really not the best timing to do this work. 

This is how our "TV/piano" room looked during winter. 

The "blinded" tower 

On the outside, it was just the look that was affected. It didn't really look pretty with the wooden planks and plastic where there should be the windows. But I think our carpenter did a nice job with setting up a good layer to avoid the worse. 

It didn't really help during the worse winter days. It was blowing through and the room was icy. The fact that it was also dark didn't really help (I moved my plants out of the room so they could get some minimal sunlight). 

The tower room

Playing the piano, but even watching the TV was definitely not cosy, despite the internal sets of windows (innebågar). Of course, it is not like that with the windows we have always had proper isolation, rather the opposite, but still, this would have worked best during late spring/summer. We have though to be happy we actually got the job started at all :-)