The Historic District

Wood radiator covers warping: Hi all! We recently had a woodworking shop create 3 radiator covers for our house where the original metal covers had gone missing. They were constructed with open metal grills on three sides, a partial height (above the baseboard) solid back. The tops are hinged for ac...

Gothichome, thank you for the thoughts. Some responses and follow up questions: 1. Potential weight from excessive glazing putty: our windows have what seem to be fairly shallow glass channel. They are about 1/4" deep even though we have fairly large glass sizes (getting up to 40"x29"). The new glaz...

Manalto, Thank you for your reply. Our windows actually do have existing weatherstripping at the meeting rail and at head and sill. There is currently nothing at the jambs aside from adjustable interior stops (and some of those don't quite adjust enough to be effective. That said, the company doing ...

Well the contractors are done working on the upstairs windows,  but the work on them is far from done.  They essentially got to a point in the work where they determined that they had done what they had been contacted to do,  the job had lasted longer than they expected (9 weeks total) and they were...

Thanks, both of you. Regarding weights: they haven't been taking the weights out of the pocket, just briefly each to attach the chain so I don't think that is the issue. They do have 5 sets of sashes out so I suppose they could have mixed them up but they were pretty good at numbering them on the wa...

Okay, all so we and our painters started work on our windows last week, and we need some help from people who have done this before. The sashes have been pulled out, the sashes and frame stripped down and painted/stained. Now they are putting the sashes back in and having a really hard time getting ...

Gothichome, Late reply, but the fireplace and sunroom project stalled out last year. I got as far as scrapping all of the mastic off the fireplace brick, or at least enough that I feel like the rest of the residue should come off with the paint stripping. I think we will try to pick this up again ne...

The portieres really do look great! There's evidence that the 3 cased opening in our house had them (one between the foyer and living room and two between the living room and sun room). There are three little holes that have been filled at the top of each jamb casing which must have been for the dra...

Phil, As always, thank you for all of the thoughts. What we did was definitely done with the idea of not preventing any future options such as returning to wood burning fires. And as far as we know the city has no issues with that as others in the neighborhood have even fully rebuilt their chimneys....

Gothichome, that is a thought. I would assume that there is a layer of roofing membrane on the saddle, followed by the copper flashing, with the roofing membrane from the upper roof then lapping over the copper. I was thinking about the vertical joints against the brick failing, but the horizontal j...