Windowsill Project

Another great illustration of my creative process in all of its clunk. This will be day nine of the project. I spent all summer procrastinating replacing this half-rotten exterior sill on the old part of the house, south side. My main fear was that the whole wall would be rotten and I'd never get it all patched up before the rains. When we got the sunny stretch I finally dove in.

It took two days to get the sill out, including a bit of online research and a tool survey. It had been a long time since I did anything resembling fine woodworking, so I had to drag out a lot of things to find my cats paw and blades for the reciprocal saw. The jigsaw was missing the set screw...a dumb mistake to let that thing drop without picking it up sometime in the last year or so. I do have a backup jigsaw. Most of my tools are leftover ones from exes who abandoned them, though I bought some Bosch. It didn't take me long to see that I did not have the proper tool to cut clapboards, but I got started, then went to BiMart.

I got a cheap flush cutter, but since you can't say that in public without some scary looks, I will have to find a better name than Multipurpose Oscillating Tool, perhaps Mabel. This turned out to be such a useful item I got some attachments and am quite fond of it already.With that and my reciprocal saw, I bravely cut around the edges of the sill and got it out in one piece. About a third of it was completely gone, but there was not much rot around it, if you don't count the missing end of the king stud with the termite damage. I convinced myself that the damage was old and there were no active bugs in my wall, as there are no other signs.

This does explain the questioning look I got from the window contractor about fifteen years ago when I told him to just put the window trim back on the way it was, without really taking a look at it myself. He pointed out a couple of the worst pieces. I remember making another window sill on the north side, and I know I made sills for the windows I installed in the new part, but I didn't do a great job on those and if you know anything about trim you can tell who made them.

This one is different. I know more now. I know to put a kerf in the underside to keep water from running back into the house, and I know to make sure the front surface goes a bit downhill. I know to use some kind of water barrier under the sill as overprotection. I saw that on This Old House and with some effort managed to get such a product at Home Despot, a place I don't enjoy but which is within biking distance of me. It is a nine-inch wide self-adhesive asphaltum product that smells extremely toxic but looks awesome in place if you don't see the wrinkles and folds. It's very sticky. I have a lot left over even though I installed it twice.

The good news is that now I don't need those cedar spacers I was going to use to fill in the inside gap...the vinyl tape does that job. I might have to cram the nicely fitted sill in since I made it to fit exactly. That is the problem for today. I did completely prime and paint the sill and it is ready to go in, but if I have to shave it a bit I will have to repaint, possibly. We'll see. I'm refusing to work on it until the fog lifts each day, because I work for myself and I am suffering enough being tied to this project for over a week already. It's sort of suffering...I do hate sanding and I am focusing intently on this thing, standing on concrete, for hours each day, so I'm not riding my bike or taking walks or the many other things I am supposed to be keeping up with.

I don't have a table saw. To get the 2x8 board to resemble a sill, I had to remove some wood in some tricky ways. I decided this was the perfect opportunity to polish my skills with hand tools, the kind that use elbow grease for power. I used a backsaw, two planes, some rasps and scrapers, Mabel and the Skilsaw, and lots of straight edges and clamps. I did things wrong, but I can do that just fine when no one is watching. I got the plane to sound right as it turned out pretty shaving curls. I figured out ways to make the edge straight without the table saw and make angled cuts with the skilsaw without losing any appendages. I wasted some hours, but the sun was out and the sky glorious against the amazing colored trees and early on I had decided to enjoy the project above all.

My fall-back was that if I messed up this blank that I made from a leftover board, I could use it for a pattern to make one out of a new, nicer piece. I might have saved myself a lot of work, but the old board turned out to be a solid beauty and I am proud I saved it from the wood rack, where a squirrel is trying to nest and chewing up the ends of all of my wood. (Evicted, at least temporarily.)

So the front edge is still a tiny bit wambly. I worked on it for hours and hours but a bad start makes for a bad finish. There are probably fifteen table saws in my neighborhood and it would have saved days if I had asked to use one to make the initial cuts. I didn't though. It looks slightly handmade still, even all shiny with white enamel.

But I love that about it. Every part of this house looks handmade. I call it my first draft house. I plan to get to the edits with about the same efficiency of the original builders who put it here around the turn of the twentieth century. Houses are really not finished products in the last-century mode in which I live. To my thinking it would feel tragic to throw up a new, finished house in a few months at the huge expense of materials and cash necessary for that modern type of construction. I relish the lifetime project I am involved in with my tiny property and its two tiny dwellings.

I am having a problem with the prospect of aging and diminishing abilities to do things like the roofing I considered and then scheduled for next summer. It might be my last big project, or not. I fantasize about a lot of mostly decorative improvements and things I really do want to finish from my last few edits. For instance, after three replacements I might just decide wooden front steps are not practical, at least as presently designed. Winter is almost here, and most of the things I would like to do will not get done now, but in the next few years, the next decade, I might just do a lot of projects, or delegate them, or leave them for the next owners.

But that's fine with me. I found that the expected rot was not so invasive and terrible as I feared, and that is probably true throughout the houses. I am on a slow time scale, the time scale of a house that is already almost a century old by almost all accounts. This house time


is slower than the human time scale, but tied to a lifetime. The Vaughans are gone from the property, but still tied to me, and every piece of work I do on this old pile of carefully arranged fir connects me with the pioneers and my town's history.

I'm in love with the mystery and extension of it, in both ways. I picture my son practicing his hand-tool skills on replacing some of my work, maybe living in the houses with his own kids deflecting their demands for skylights and balconies and secret cubbies. He will shake his head and marvel at some of my stupid mistakes, and make a few of his own perhaps. I will definitely document the history of the house with and without me, have a story to seal up in the walls for the future, or in the library for the community, or just to enjoy the process of building the documentation as I have built up the property.

Every time I garden, building the soil or nurturing the trees I rescued, every time I fix something or add an improvement, I am participating in a sacred, fulfilling and basic quest for shelter that is comfortable, durable, and beautiful. It has been a lot more than a windowsill project this week. Maybe I am taking my time with it because I can, but it feels intentional. I love looking inside that old wall.

I must remember these emotions next summer when it is roof time. It is fun. This is my kind of fun.