Tag Archives: creature feature

Well, when I’m in the barn and looking out. More to the point, the glass won’t be falling out of the panes any time soon.

This was a rather large project for only 3 windows, lots of work to get the old panes out, clean up the wood, sand, paint (primer and two coats, both sides), get the new glass in, and get them up.

To start with:

Windows out, panes out,

Variety of points I found,

Kinda not a lot to work with in places,

Between waiting for things to dry, and having to do things like work, and going away for a weekend to play, the project took almost 2 weeks,

Done!

(the photo on the right was waiting for 4 replacement panes).

And now I have to do the ones over the deck.

I learned a lot in this process…

It is easy to break glass getting the panes out. It is hard to cut glass when there’s only an inch or half an inch to trim off. I ended up having the hardware store cut it for me.

Only after I set the glass in the smaller windows with narrower mullions did I learn you can trim the ends of the points (not the pointy end, the flanges).

I bought a glazer’s putty knife, and it was really helpful, because it’s so stiff.

I was extremely frustrated with the local hardware store. I went to them first to get more DAP 33 glazing compound and points. They didn’t have points. And I waited 20 minutes while the single person available helped another person, and then another helper came out. He couldn’t find the points either. So I left the compound and went off to Lowe’s, where one can buy a whole gallon of the stuff for only $6 more than the quart cost at the local shop. And they had lots of points.

Apparently the DAP can be very variable. I’m used to it sometimes being a tad dry (add a drop or two of linseed oil while you knead it). But the new gallon was wet! It was unworkable! I found one reference online where they talked about adding whiting to stiffen it up so it’s workable. This is calcium carbonate, or lime. When I asked for whiting at the local hardware store, they didn’t know what I meant. I said what I wanted it for, they still didn’t know. So I said “calcium carbonate”. She says “something a little less Latin please?”. Sorry, hon, not Latin. Anyhow, I told her “you know… lime???” Oh, we have that, but you have to buy 50 pounds. Cripes. I needed about 3 ounces.

So I used cornstarch on my hands. It helped. And I kneaded some into the compound. Probably beetles will get into it, but we’ll be gone by then.

Also, I re-glazed the windows over the deck about 10 years ago, and they are in sore need of it again. I learned this time around that it helps if you either put down linseed oil on the mullions (I didn’t do this, but if I had oil paint, I would have), or prime and paint them (this is what I did).

I did take the windows out and had them flat to work on. I can’t imagine doing all these little panes in place.

There, now you know.

Bats! At work!

We think they’re living on the unoccupied 3rd floor… in the past 5 weeks, we’ve had 5 bats in our office areas… one was flying up and down the hall. These two were just hanging out. One in a doorway, where it wasn’t there the 5 minutes before, and then it was. It was squeeky/noisy/unhappy about being moved. The other I discovered under my gym bag. It was pretty sleepy.

Claire thinks they’re cute, and they are. It’s nice to see they don’t appear to have the dreaded whitenose syndrome. We think these are little brown bats.

Good thing Claire has such long legs (she’s a few inches taller than me!)… she hardly got any burdock on her.

All the bat appear to be behaving normally, so we don’t really worry too much about rabies. But I tell everybody not to touch them!

I have loads more to post, but it’ll have to wait for another day… dyeing! spinning! dinosaur bra!