Let’s talk about Vinyl windows for a short moment. The situation is much the same with vinyl windows as it is with PVC trim. Vinyl windows initially sound like the answer to all of your questions. Let’s say I have this old home with century old windows that probably haven’t been touched in over 30 years. They don’t work so great, they look a little rough, and they need regular maintenance. Vinyl windows have none of those issues. Once they are installed, they look good enough, function good enough, and have zero maintenance. Problem solved. Phew.

Now we fast forward 10 years. Does the situation look so good? Not likely. The function has likely already diminished, some glass may be fogging up, and you want to change the color scheme of your house but are stuck with that awful white vinyl window.

If we continue on another 10 years, you are likely now forced to consider replacing those vinyl windows. Soon enough you will be tossing your 20 year old vinyl windows in a landfill on top of your old 100 year old windows. If you had not tossed your original windows in the trash, they would have lasted indefinitely. They need maintenance, yes, but the amount of time you can get away with neglecting maintenance on them is likely longer than the full life of the vinyl saviors you so coveted. The large majority of the windows we work on have not been cared for in 30-50 years with no detrimental effect.

Polyvinyl Chloride in any form just doesn’t bring to the table everything you had hoped it would. It also leaves an awful mess behind it. So here are just 5 reasons to avoid the temptation to use PVC on your old home.

1. Most Installers don’t know how to Install it Properly. Carpenters are often the folks installing your exterior trim. Carpenters work with wood, or at least that is how it started. PVC is not wood. If you deal with PVC like you do wood there can be major problems. Wood expands in width (across the grain) and not very much in length. PVC expends in length. A lot. expansion and contraction can create major gaps in improperly installed PVC trim. These gaps often put more stress on the caulk filling them than it can handle and the seal breaks. This allows water in. Even though PVC does not rot or encourage mold growth, I can assure you that everything behind it, from the sheething to the studs and drywall most certainly do when they get wet.
2. PVC gets very Hot. Why does that matter? Although PVC takes paint just fine that doesn’t mean it will look good painted, particularly a dark color. A dark paint will make the trim even hotter and expand even more. It will certainly start to cook that paint off far sooner than you had hoped and you will likely see white lines where joints between boards failed. If you read the product literature on PVC trim you will find that they advise you to not paint their product a dark color.
3. PVC does not absorb moisture. Yes, this is a positive thing in many ways but it also can be harmful. First, your paint takes a good deal longer to fully cure because paint was built with the expectation to have wood absorbing some of the moisture. Full cure on PVC takes up to 30 days; full cure on wood trim is usually half that time. That is a very large window for things to go wrong. Second, any moisture that does get behind it has no way to get out. Wood trim would be able to absorb small amounts of moisture from behind and release it to the exterior with no harm done. If there was more than a small amount that is getting in the wood trim would certainly absorb that and rot can happen. But you would also be warned before the problem got out of hand. The paint would quickly begin to fail in that area and you essentially be notified that something bad is going on. PVC would do no such thing. It would continue to look pristine while rot is devouring your sheathing and framing.
4. PVC doesn’t break down and is one of the least recyclable materials out there. Once it is produced it is pretty much here to stay. Let’s just pretend that the trim installed on your house stay there forever. What about the cut-offs? They will go to a landfill and stay there forever, slowly leaking harmful dioxins into the environment. What about all of the PVC sawdust? Same thing. Meanwhile, if you used wood, the cutoffs don’t have to have the same outcome. I have brought them home to throw in my wood burning stove many times. I have regularly used our wood sawdust in my compost and mulch. Our local lumber yard sends their sawdust off to local farms for animal bedding and floor covering.
5. The production of PVC is extremely bad for the environment. The dioxins released during production are some of the most toxic chemicals out there. The level of harm that these chemicals can do is quite high. According to the EPA, there is no safe level of dioxin for humans or other animals. Further, they assert that the levels in humans and children is already high enough to present health problems. What about wood? Oh yeah, it spends its pre-lumber life as a tree. Producing oxygen. Sucking up CO2.

I’m not one to put my personal opinions out there too much. Particularly when it comes to my customers, it is not my opinion that will be of any use to them but my knowledge and expertise. But this opinion will not come as a shock to anyone so I will just put it out there. I. Hate. Vinyl. Okay, hate is a strong word and I do not completely hate it. As the saying goes, I like my music vinyl and my windows wood. Other than it’s contribution to music, I find vinyl repugnant.

(Even so many people may not know this fun fact: the earliest records were actually made of Shellac, one of my favorite building materials. You could actually break pieces off, dissolve them in some alcohol, and put a nice finish on some furniture. No surprise this shift from a sustainable and healthy option to harmful and carcinogenic happened in the 1940’s. Right around the time most everything in the building industry and consumer products in general took the same quality and environmental impact nosedive.)

It comes as no surprise to anyone considering our line of business that I loathe vinyl windows. But are windows the only place that we find vinyl? Nope. I think most people don’t realize the full name of vinyl: Polyvinyl Chloride or PVC. Yup, it was right there all along. PVC and vinyl are one and the same.

We’ve become accustomed to the PVC pipes in our buildings. Apparently we don’t mind hearing the splash of water every time someone flushes a toilet. Though anyone that has tried to sleep in the bottom floor of a home with PVC pipe may feel differently. If you are building a home with bedrooms on the first floor, please do them a favor and run them some blissfully silent cast iron.

Now we are seeing PVC all over the exteriors of our homes. Not only that, it is being pitched as a, gulp, “Green” option. So I’m just going to come out and say it: There is nothing Green about vinyl. Ever. It is one of the most harmful products ever created and if the producers and users of the material bore the full cost to society of it, the price would be worse than prohibitive. Check out our next post, Five Reason to Avoid PVC

Top Tricks of Window Restoration

Despite the fact that people have been working on old windows for many years, when we started out there was a dearth of information on how to actually do so.  Over the years we have tried things many different things.  Some methods and materials are more effective than others.  Sometimes unpredictably so.  Nevertheless, there are a few things we have learned along the way that remain constant.  This is a list of the top 5 most valuable tools and materials that we use every day as we restore historic wood windows.  Without them, I can confidently say that there would be a whole lot more cussing in our shop.

1. Steambox!  It all starts here.  This is the workhorse.  If you do not have one of these and you have any desires to enjoy the task of restoring windows, you must get one.  There of course are some very expensive ones out there like the fantastic one produced by Bagala Window Works, called The Steam Stripper.  It is not really something a DIY person can afford but for a serious restoration shop it will pay for itself.  However, that is not the only option.  You can make your own using materials found at your local hardware or home supply for under $200 (not including the steam machine, which could set you back another $200 brand new).  A well built DIY box will pay for itself 10 fold.  At our shop, we have built at least a half dozen boxes.  Our current box, built with stainless steel sheet metal, hopefully will be our last.

The steambox is the single best way to soften and remove the old hard putty holding the glass in place.  As a result, there is far less glass breakage.  In addition, most paint is easily removed from the wood surfaces.  On top of all of this the steam is the cleanest and safest way to remove materials containing lead.  So, yeah this thing is the bomb.

2. Whiting Powder:  This is an item that always seems to be overlooked on how valuable it is.  It is simply a chalk like powder that we use to clean the oils from the glazing putty from the glass.  It also helps start the curing process of the finished glazing.  When you finish tooling the putty on a window, you simply brush this onto the glass like you are dusting for finger prints and it will magically remove all of the finger prints from the glass.  This used to be a common material found at hardware stores but now it can be difficult to find.  Don’t even think about the big box stores.  To give an idea of the value of this, recently we ran out of whiting and we halted all glazing work until it was replenished.  Life without it just isn’t desirable.

3.  Quality Glazing Putty:  Since we are on the topic of glazing let’s not overlook the actual putty.  A good quality glazing putty tools well, cures fairly quickly, and maintains the seal and elasticity for a while.  The one we swear by is produced by Sarco Putty Company.  The glazing putty you will find at most hardware stores and home centers do not fall into the quality category in my mind. Do not succumb to reaching for the low hanging fruit.  You will regret it.

4. Glazier’s Hammer and Point Driver:  These are two specialized tools for this specific trade.  The point driver quickly and easily sets the glazing points into the rabbets holding the glass in place.  Depending on the window, the wood may be a bit too hard for the gun to set the points as deep as you need.  That is where the Glazier’s hammer comes in.  It has a flat face that sits flush to the glass and allows you to tap the point into the wood deeper.  These tools combined will increase the speed of finishing windows as well as reduce glass breakage a bit.

5.  Wood Epoxy:  This stuff is pretty much what puts the restore in restoration.  These old windows have been around for a while and there is no doubt that there will be some knicks, dings, and damage.  With a good quality epoxy you can fill and rebuild parts of the windows to make them look like new.  Without epoxy, our windows wouldn’t even look half as nice as they do.  We also would be spending so much more time replacing items such as sills and muntins without epoxy.

These are not the only items that we consider invaluable but they by far have the most impact on our day to day restoration process.  Even for a homeowner taking on the restoration of your own windows, all of these items should be in your arsenal.

Things are a bit crazy in the world right now. With malicious viruses sweeping their way through our lives it is hard not to feel helpless. It is times like these that remind me how I started in the window restoration business in the first place. Living in a house with old windows that were in desperate need of repair and no knowledge to do so, I felt a bit helpless. For me then, as it still is now, seeking out the knowledge and skills I lack is the best way to ease my mind.

Like many in our area right now, I find myself with a little time to kill at home. My time killer of choice today is to do another round of seasoning my cast iron pans. Ever since reading and following Sheryl Canter’s Blog and the Cook’s Illustrated coverage of her cast iron pan seasoning method, I have cooked my fried eggs on my skillet without any problems. I highly recommend cooking with cast iron in general. If any of you watched the Dark Waters Film this past year you may now know the risks of non-stick pans. (Okay, if we are going to continue to head on tangents here, you should also check out the documentary The Devil We Know, which covers the same story and is on Netflix. Both movies are great ways to spend your time as you shelter in place) Luckily you can naturally achieve a non-stick surface if you follow this method of seasoning your pans. I warn you it takes some time to do it right but that is one thing most of us have in excess right now.

So now we can get onto the heart of this post: The Flax plant. The flax plant is one of the most useful plants in human history. The oil that I use to season my skillets is Flaxseed oil. At work, we use linseed oil to pre-treat wood and linseed oil is a major ingredient in oil glazing putty and some oil paints. Guess what? Linseed oil and flaxseed oil are one and the same. They are the oil that is derived from the flax seed. For the most part it seems the only real difference is that we tend to call the oil we use for cooking and eating flaxseed and we refer to the oil we use in home improvement and painting as linseed oil.

The oils from the seeds are not even this plant’s most significant contribution to humanity. The textile called linen is derived from the fibers of this plant. It seems that linen is the source for the alternate name for the seeds being called linseeds (linoleum is also a product derived from this seed and the name has the same source). No matter what you call it, humans have been using the fibers of the flax plant for a crazy long time. Textiles using flax fibers have been found dating as far back as 30,000 years.

Linseed oil has been used as a binder in paints for hundreds of years. It is the chemical properties of the oil that make it so attractive. It is applied and flows like an oil but it dries (technically oxidizes) to a solid form. In its solid form it still remains somewhat pliable and also fairly hydrophobic, which is why it functions so well in paints and putties. That also explains why it seasons my cast iron pans so well.

As with everything, there is a downside to linseed oil. It is highly flammable and is know to spontaneously combust. Care must be taken when working with linseed oil to avoid this undesirable event. Store linseed oils and paints in metal cabinets. For rags that have the oil on them, we lay them out flat on the ground far from combustible materials and place them in a metal container when they have dried.

Knowing what a fantastically useful plant the flax is, it made me wonder if I should plant my own flax plants just in case I need to produce my own oil and linen. The answer to that question was a clear yes to planting this in my garden. It has a surprisingly pretty blue flower. Though it would ease my mind knowing I have the plant out there in case I need to make my own linseed oil and linen, I read about all that goes into both processes and I have moved on from that fantasy. Things aren’t that bad…