I screen, you screen...

Yes, I know I have way too many projects going on. Still painting the front porch. The downstairs bathtub drain became slow and turned into a huge plumbing project. Had to redo the brick patio where the plumbing pipe got dug out. About to put hardwood floor in bedroom upstairs and considering tearing out the underlayment under the linoleum and seeing what's down there. AND...screens! :) Mercifully 6 old frames for screens had been left in the basement from ages past, and I've taken it upon myself to scrape, prime and paint them in my "spare" time (hee hee). I can't wait until they're done, they should spruce up the front of the house SO much...I am counting the days until those old broken aluminum frames come down.

After searching around online for tips, I found this great advice about placing spacers between the top and bottom edges of the window frame and some long boards, and clamping the center of each side of the frame to the center of the boards to flex the frames while stapling the screens. Then remove the clamps, the frame springs back into place, and, magic! the screen is pulled drum tight. The screen frame is the red-painted wood below.

Hmmm....which piece of wood looks bent to you? Duh, I should have realized that just about any new wood could be bent in circles around these old hardwood frames!
So instead, I clamped two frames to *each other* and that did the trick. I should have known...it takes old hardwood to stand up to old hardwood.

By the way, these window frames survived countless floods in the basement before I could rescue them and had not a speck of rot.

Now we're getting the beading primed and painted, and ready to hang the screens:

We will be replacing the aluminum frame on the right of the porch. Note that the porch itself is still a project in progress, too! You can also see we had some pretty awesome background music for this final moment...:)

Taking out the old aluminum frame...(drumroll, please).....

And here it is...the big moment... hanging our very first restored window....what? WHAT? You mean, the former owners actually *caulked* the aluminum frame on with *bathtub caulk*? I CAN'T BELIEVE IT!

As you will learn through my blogs, a past owner seemed to think that no project could not be fixed without bathtub caulk. It's amazing where this stuff keeps turning up (it has been found as window sealant, window glazing, wood filler, you name it in this house).

Hanging the screen isn't quite like the moment I had dreamed of, knowing that now we will have to prime and paint the green frame (and go to the paint store to get matching paint), to cover up where all the putty has been scraped off....

Oh well, a project in an Old House is never *truly* done, is it?

Finally, late this summer we painted the trim around the screens and the house is looking much nicer.

You can see the big contrast between the upstairs window and the downstairs one which we had fixed.

Uh oh, what? You mean...it's winter? Now with many of the aluminum storms gone, we either have to get working like crazy on those five old storm windows in the basement, or prepare for some really expensive heating bills this winter! Here is one of the five old storms that we found in the basement that we've already painted.

Each one has required removing the old glass, scraping, priming, replacing with new panes, glazing, priming some more, and painting with two coats of paint. So far we have two of the five done. Three of these storms can replace the three upstairs screens we put in; unfortunately the downstairs screens don't have any matching storms in the basement. We did find the two huge storms for the bay window.

Bay window before:

Later this winter I hope to have some more updates on our storm window progress! Either that or we will be taping plastic sheets over our windows to stay warm ;)