Window sills

[Neighmond]

Hey, oaktree! How's the abode coming along?

[Don M]

Looking good; in my area the 5/4s wood is much more expensive because it's uncommon these days. I know because I bought some to build a set of exterior shutters which required the extra thickness.

[phil]

5/4 in knot free old growth grade A lumber is pricey. If you want enough you can get it from a small local mill and that is cheaper but you can't buy just one board.
I have even gone to the extent where I really loved the grain of a board so I split it into about 1/4" thick and than made the top casing hollow like a box with no back. Not so hard to do as you'd think. just glue wood strips to the edges and trim it down to size. use endgrain bits on the ends so you don't notice the difference. If you start with a 2x8 or 2x10 you can use the extra wood from the same board so the grain and the color is an almost identical match because the pieces are all from the same board. front can be 1/4 and the rest is just wood strips along the 4 edges. one nice 2x10 will make 3 nice casings about he same length.

no one has ever noticed the ones that are hollow and who cares what they weigh? It saves cost but I did it mostly because I really like the grain pattern in certain boards

earlier I posted the roundover is 1/4, it might actually be 3/16ths. the side casings are quite rounded. If I strip them sometimes I just take a hair trim off the edges to clean them up then run the router over to redo the roundover and that makes stripping faster. I usually get the bulk off with a heat gun then just use my 4" table sander. you could use a belt sander too if that's what is on hand. on all the newer ones where they get it sorta kinda but not really right, it's partly because the dimension are not right but also they never do enough rounding over and it changes the look and style .

Doing the round overs with a router is very fast. just use a cutter with guide bearing and run around the edges of the piece.. You don't need a router table for this

[oaktree]

Yes, 5/4 would have added many thousands to the cost. I went the commonly available sizes of solid maple (which already was pricey) that would have been close to what they used then. Since checking out similar old houses, I think it turned out pretty well.

Here's what I ended up with:



I was at an 1840 Greek Revival today, and my window sills and trim are actually pretty close to the original trim in that house:



Up until now, I regretted that I decided to line the sills up with the edges of the frame because it wasn't what they did back then. But then I saw in the 1840 house today that people did that back then too, and now I feel better.

I think I could have rounded the edges a little bit more with some sandpaper, but it's okay.

[Don M]

They look fine & using maple was a great choice!

[oaktree]

They look fine & using maple was a great choice!

Thanks, Don! It ended up being one of the biggest material costs because I had to redo the trim in the entire house. After taking up 4 inches of flooring there was no choice but to do it, not that what was there before was so nice to begin with. I wanted to get as close to historically accurate as I could afford...I went with 1 x 4" and 1 x 6" maple. Thicker 5" and 7" trim would have been more common then, but then I would have had to by wider boards and cut them down.