Un-Capping the Windows

Viewer discretion advised: this post contains graphic images of architectural violence.

I was too impatient to wait until the weekend to start peeling off the low-maintenance downgrades my house got. The capping was a job I could take on myself. I actually bent a little bit of it back years ago and left it that way thinking nothing I could do would really make it uglier. Just how ugly are we talking?

Holy caulk! And it might even be worse at the top where they just used caulk to reduce the height of the window opening.

The bad news is all that caulk basically glued on the capping. The good news is the aluminum is such flimsy shit I can tear it with my own bare hands. And underneath? We have weird gaps between the windows and the original framing…

And we can see a super weird older update. The window sills were capped with polished, diamond creased stainless steel. This is actually common in the neighborhood. Apparently people thought it was a good idea to make their Victorian rowhouse look like a hot dog truck.

The downside of this stuff is that it’s heavy and well installed. Read: it’s not coming off with the windows in place. And believe me, I tried. I bent one of them up so badly I cut it off with tin snips. This was a lot of work to just partially expose it, so I’m done with it for now. But I found something interesting: the exterior wood trim was faux grained! And also, the wood is in surprisingly good condition – even parts of the paint look brand new! Parts.

I’ll still need to strip it, so I did a test patch with the heat gun and this faux graining just might be the only paint on the wood. I was trying to figure out if that means it’s original but it can’t be. The house would probably have been 60 years old when the food truck capping went on. So the faux finisher apparently did a really good job and stripped the whole house back to bare wood… just to have someone else cover over it. The good news is the heat gun makes quick work of this, so I’ll be able to strip the sills at the same time that I’m replacing the windows. (Note: I feel comfortable using the heat gun for the sills. I  can only hope that I find an equally effective procedure to strip the cornice that won’t risk burning the house down.)

So the exterior trim is in good shape. That’s great news. The other thing that un-capping revealed was that the tops of the windows shifted almost 2 inches in so the windows have a crazy slant.

Which means that in some spots the brick mold isn’t covering the brick anymore. And up top there are also chunks of loose mortar just held up by the casing.

So I decided that it should come off before I strip the brick. It will also be easier to restore the casing when it’s off the house. And luckily, I was able to pry it away from the window framing without splitting it this time. (I had a lot of trouble with that job inside the house.)

One other thing I noticed – the window framing, including the old counterweight cavities, is not as well preserved as the casing. In one spot my screwdriver went right through it. This definitely helps with any guilt I’ve been feeling about pulling out original window framing.

So, one weeknight of work got a few questions answered, and if anything the job is looking just a smidge easier and cheaper now. I’d say it was worth skipping the gym! Stay tuned for what we find this weekend.