Transformation

[phil]

what a difference, your house just got older in a good way! that siding made it look like a newer house and taking it off made a world of difference and it looks like your original siding is nice!

is that little mini railing at the corner window original? it seems quite an unusual feature.

loks like your front door has a casing with "ears" on top , it will look nice if you can make similar casings. On my house the top board is 1 inch and the sides are 3/4 so there is a bit of a step which causes water to not saturate the side casings. also the sills usually have about a 4 degree slant and they are the extra thick kind of lumber, ( fir) its one spot where that thickness difference shows, You could add sills like that just to the outside of the building and that would make a difference as well.
is the door sill still wood? If you use standard 2x lumber you could just build up the outside edge even 1/8th thicker with a strip underneath.

I don't know if your kind of siding would protrude, because my house is shingles what they did was sort of double up the shingles just where they are above windows so when water runs down the side of the house it doesn't drip on the casings, it might hit the outside sill on its way down though.

[Vala]

First of all, thanks and:

is that little mini railing at the corner window original? it seems quite an unusual feature.

Yeah it is original. The one up on the side gable isnt, it is a crude replacement of the original, which was ornate.

loks like your front door has a casing with "ears" on top , it will look nice if you can make similar casings. On my house the top board is 1 inch and the sides are 3/4 so there is a bit of a step which causes water to not saturate the side casings. also the sills usually have about a 4 degree slant and they are the extra thick kind of lumber, ( fir) its one spot where that thickness difference shows, You could add sills like that just to the outside of the building and that would make a difference as well.
is the door sill still wood? If you use standard 2x lumber you could just build up the outside edge even 1/8th thicker with a strip underneath.

I'm not really following a lot of this, but all windows/doors had the same crown moulding, the under the porch part never had siding, so there was nothing to strip, it was painted green on the wood unlike the rest which was white aluminum siding painted green... yea the door sill is wood and in great shape.

[kelt65]

Wow, what a difference! I was gonna wait until I got it painted to show it off, but it just looks 1000x better just now I wanted to show the difference now!

Removed vinyl shutters and most of the siding off of the 2nd story front face. Some still over the beadboard eaves and a few moulding I haven't gotten to yet.

Wow, it's like they preserved it for you! I'd be terrified to pull that stuff off, for fear of what is - or isn't - beneath it.

[phil]

I'm not really following a lot of this, but all windows/doors had the same crown moulding,

Its hard to see in the pictures but I suspect they replaced all the outer door and window casings, I think the original ones would have been 4 inches wide or maybe 4 1/4" and with rounded corners. the casing above each door and window should be a full 1 inch thick. and wider than 4 inches , more like 6 or 7 inches. the upper casing should stick out from the house further than the casings at either side. Just look to see if you can see other hoses in your area where the casings haven't been replaced. or if you see the picture I just posted look at the casing around my front door (phils stairs) as a comparison , should yours look like that? it is very common in craftsman style houses.

the piece of casing above the doorway is thicker ( full one inch) for two reasons:

1- if the top board wasn't thicker, where it meets the vertical casings on either side of the doorway the roundover of the bottom edge of the casing above the door would meet the upper edge of the casing and that would look funny, but since the piece above the door is 1 inch and the casings on either side are 3/4 the roundover on the upper casing above the door doesn't interfere with the gap of the upper edge of the casings on either side because it sticks out further from the house than they do.

2 - having the casing above the door thicker than the rest shelters the other casings from rain at least near the top edge.



the problem you encounter when you go to buy 4 inch wide wood is that you can't buy it.
2x4s are only 3 1/2 inches so they are too narrow. 1 inch thick lumber is also uncommon. so to cut the casings the right size you need to start with 2x6 ( or 1 1/2" x 5") which isn't very economical and it is lots of sawing so they contractors reduce the size of the casings to use the newer dimensions of material that you can commonly find in the lumberyard. If you look at any modern casings they are always a smaller dimension than those used on older houses.
so what the contracors do is use "1x4"s which are neither 1 inch or 4 inches , and it shows.

also if you look at the shape of the board above your front door and the one above the window beside it you see it juts out at an angle, it isn't cut square at the two ends. I might be wrong but from what I can see it looks to me like all your windows should have the upper trim cut to that angle. it is a very simple craftsman feature.
I see many modern houses where they try to replicate the trim and they mimic the craftsman style but they use the standard dimension 3/4 thick x 3 1/2 inch wide lumber, they don't round the corners properly and they try to get away with using the same thickness of lumber at the sides as they do at the top. all those proportions are so often mimicked in newer houses but if you look at older houses you find those casings are heavier.

if you wanted to recreate the casings from standard dimension lumber you'd need to use 2x6 for each side and 2x8 for the casing above the door. that's a waste of wood ! especially since you don't want pine you want something that will take the weather like cedar or fir

If you wanted to do all the casings you could go somewhere that sells rough cut lumber to the woodwoking trade and look at using 4/4 for the side casings and 5/4 for the upper casings and then after you planed the lumber you'd be down to full dimension 3/4 inch and 1 inch thicknesses.

(5/4 is 1 1/4" thick rough cut lumber) 6/4 is 1 1/2 inch thick lumber, a place that sells lumber to the cabinet shops will use that terminology

those old dimensions are more difficult to obtain which is why contractors go cheap on the modern casings. You can't really get the dimensions of wood that you need from a lumberyard. it creates some expense but If you are restoring the siding i'd replace the casings with the right sized ones too. I would not replace the windows, it is too expensive, so id keep the windows you have just fix the casings to look old.

I noted that in the pictures I can see a red line above each of the windows, is that a piece of wood or is that a shadow where the original casing masked the white paint, is the house red under the white paint?

[JRC]

Phil, look at the 2nd photo in this thread: viewtopic.php?f=5&t=1588
I believe that is the detail missing from the top of all the windows not under the porch roof. The red line you see is the exposed original wood, where the trim was hacked off so that the vinyl siding would lay flat.

[Vala]

Well now I've officially heard everything. A neighbor told me "put those shutters back on, they're original to the house!"

To which I responded, first of all they are NOT original, and second they're vinyl... some people.

[Mick_VT]

Well now I've officially heard everything. A neighbor told me "put those shutters back on, they're original to the house!"

To which I responded, first of all they are NOT original, and second they're vinyl... some people.

LOL, it will be interesting to see if you find and evidence of it having shutters originally though e.g. tell tale marks / holes in the window casing. Mine were clearly visible when I stripped the paint, but not before. The mounting points for the pintles, and the doodads that hold them closed are there, as were roman numerals carved into the sills to identify which shutters went on which window.

My belief is that though people don't do this now, that (at least up here in Northern New England) the victorians removed the shutters for the winter. Winter shots of my place in the 1890s seem to be lacking shutters, but they are there during summer and fall.

[Vala]

I didn't detect any paint shadows or anything indicating shutters. We have 1 shutter in the basement, but it goes on the back where we have a 6 ft tall casement window (which was taken out and put in the attic) and that seems to be the only place that had any shutter at all.

[Mick_VT]

I didn't detect any paint shadows or anything indicating shutters. We have 1 shutter in the basement, but it goes on the back where we have a 6 ft tall casement window (which was taken out and put in the attic) and that seems to be the only place that had any shutter at all.

My experience with shutters is they dont leave a shadow, or at least didnt on my house (on windows that still had them) after many many years. Because they are not attached to the wall like the fake ones I guess. What I found was evidence of filled holes etc on the window casings where the pintles that held the shutters were. This is on the windows that did not still have the shutters when we bought the place.

I might hazard a guess that if your place had one set it had them on most if not all windows originally

[Vala]

On shutters, I'm not sure actually. However I don't see any screw holes, or dimples or anything that would show that there were shutters. Is there any rule of thumb on shutters?

Like what I mean is, I found sets of screens and storm windows in the attic (just a couple) so did houses that tended to have these things also have shutters, or was it more like shutters in place of screens etc? I'm very observant I don't even see the slightest mark where shutters could have been.

However on the same note, on all the windows on the north side (front) I don't even see any paint shadows or marks for storm or screens. Were north facing windows skipped for storm windows? And the house wasn't painted in many, many decades either, possibly not since the 20s. So most of what I was dealing with was one of the original layers of paint when I repainted this time so there woudln't have been any paint shadows or anything in that regard, unlike under the porch where it was never sided and so it was painted not too long ago.