Steel casement story, part 2

In the previous post, I mentioned our first plan of attack was to fix the windows. We definitely had our work cut out for us. You know something's not quite right when you're happy to find one of your window panes has been taped in.

Two Hope's casements windows. The center panel on each
window is fixed, and the other two open.

See? Tape.

The only ground floor casements looked like something some kids had been throwing rocks at for a while. 15 enormous panes of glass were broken, and a 16th one had been taped in. With packing tape.

So, early one Saturday morning, the two of us set to work with a lot of can-do and no idea what we were really setting out to do.







What we had:

Goggles
Not-terribly-crappy face masks
An 18v skil cordless drill
2 fully charged batteries
A paint stripper bit for said drill
A sanding sponge
A few pieces of sandpaper
Several wire brushes of different sizes
Paint stripper
Paint scrapers
Mineral spirits for cleaning the metal
Paper towels 
Metal primer
Small paint brushes
A hand broom
Glazing compound
A roll of plastic sheeting (for covering the windows overnight)
Glass cut to size

In-progress photo. Most of the rust has been cleaned;
you can see the flakes of it all over the place. Dirty job.

We stood there and used the paint stripper and used the drill attachment for whirring the rust away and scraped and sanded and scraped and whirred and sanded. The old glazing was the toughest part. We knew the stripper would not work on it, so the places where it was still adhered properly took a lot of elbow grease and a stiff scraper. Thankfully (or not?) in many places the metal hadn't been primed or painted before glazing, so there was a layer of rust between the window and the glazing. In these cases the scraper just slid between them and the old glazing was gone. Breaking the glass out was pretty difficult as well. The drill bit was awesome for the rust+paint, but steel casements have a LOT of surfaces, and the batteries were wearing out pretty quickly with the way we were using that bit. We eventually decided to only use it on the toughest patches of rust (mostly in the corners), and do a mineral spirits + wire brush + towel cleaning of the rest.

Partway through the cleaning phase.
Can see the husband in his alien gear.

So we stood there and worked and worked and when our legs fell off, we picked them up and put them back on and worked some more. The day wore on. We were going cross-eyed from staring at tiny bars of metal all day. I don't think anyone got seriously cut though, so that was a bonus. We were really worried that it might rain on us and get our clean metal wet and then all the work would go down the drain because poof, rust would return like gangbusters.

All broken and taped glass removed,
working on priming the frames.

We eventually got all the glass out and all the glazing out and all the paint off that would come off. Then we started priming, which takes just about as long as the stripping, because we had to use a tiny brush and do each cleaned surface. But at least it felt more like we were accomplishing something, with the clean white primer going on the bare metal to protect it. Also of note: we didn't even try to do anything to the inside-facing part of the windows at this point. We were just worried about anything exposed to the elements, and the parts that we had to glaze. So, while the outside was starting to look pretty nice, the inside looked just as horrible as it always had.
 

I warned you the inside was still grody.

We did manage to get a pane or two glazed in before we headed home for the night. When we did leave, we covered everything with plastic roll sheeting that we'd bought specifically for covering the windows. It was starting to rain a little even as we did that.

The next morning we got to work again, this time mostly on the glazing. Roll a thin bead of glazing for the bed, bed the glass, then press the glazing around the outside, scraping it to look right and making sure the corners shed water. Repeat. Fifteen times. It took all day. But in the end, we had something we could at least be sure would keep the water and the cats and the birds and everything else in the world out of our house.  


Of course, that wasn't the absolute end. Once the glazing had developed a skin, I came back and painted everything black. Not so sure about that choice now, but at the time it made sense, rather than the white that let the rust bleed through so terribly.


Then there's the inside, which was another couple of weekends' worth of scraping and sanding and priming and painting, and I'm still not completely finished to my satisfaction. But they keep the weather out for now, and I've turned my attention to other things that are more urgent than the cosmetics of the windows.


I spent many additional hours working on the upstairs windows, which are a bigger pain due to not having a place to stand on the outside. I got the broken ones replaced, and a lot of the rust removed and primed over, but it's quite the hassle trying to sit in the opposite window and lean outside to fix them. Not just a hassle, but painful. I've considered ladder jacks, but since they can be worked on from the inside, I don't know if it's a worthy investment just for this. 


It also turns out that some of the upstairs window panes seem to have been glazed in with joint compound. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe that's some kind of old glazing that just looks like joint compound when it dries for too long without being painted, or maybe that's giving the previous owners too much credit. 

I'd love to hear about anyone's adventures in steel casement restoration!