New kitchen windows

Our new kitchen windows finally arrived Wednesday from Cascade Lumber on Camano Island. Oddly enough the brand name is also Cascade.

After a run to stupid Home Depot (I hate that place), we started demo, the best part.


The hard part is ripping out all the little wood trim pieces, but with a chisel, Wonder Bar, and hammer, it goes pretty quickly. It helps to first score the cracks with a box knife so that none of your paint rips off the spots you want to save.



Since it's January, I recommend taping up some plastic while you're cleaning, drilling, fitting etc. to keep the house from chilling. Either that or turn off the heat.


After you pull out everything, you get to cut the pulley ropes and let the weights drop back behind the wall. It's so fun!


Those weights obviously need a hallow passage to move up and down in, so if you're not going to use them, it's a good idea to drill holes and fill the area with insulation. We bought cheap expandable spray insulation. The stuff is nasty and sticky, so be careful and wipe up immediately.

The next step is to tear off the vinyl tabs most new windows come with. Some contractors may refer to these as "window nailers." They come with holes so that you can nail the window right up to the 2x4 frame, but we obviously don't have those exposed. You can sit and try to bend, pry, and cut them off with a box knife, but the easiest (and fastest) way to get them off is to use a reciprocating saw. Have one person hold and the other cut right up against the window. Obviously you will never see this part of the frame, so don't worry about smudges, little cuts, etc.

After some swearing and leveling, shim the windows up against the interior piece of trim. Now the question is "Do you level the window to a true level or do you eyeball it so that it looks good up against the sill?" We did these windows by eyeballing it. The first (north window) was fitted with the level.....and it now looks a little crooked. So it just depends on what you think is right.

Here are the new windows! They still need to be cleaned, but I'm waiting for the caulk around the sill and trim to dry.


The outside looks nothing like the beautiful inside. The outside is ripped up and there's a huge gap under the bottom because the sill is angled down. We will have to borrow a table saw to rip a nice, angled piece to fit under the bottom. Caulk that up and then fit some decorative trim around the whole thing to make it air tight (and hide the old wood).