In continuing your house search, remember that nothing gets more action than the windows and doors.
If they don`t fit exactly as they should, they`ll catch on the jamb or threshold and suffer the consequences. And windows and doors that are made of wood are always changing their shape slightly, getting bigger in the summer and smaller (because they`re drier) in the winter. Carpenters account for this variation in standard construction technique, but if the house has gone out of square, or if the hinges and related hardware are not in good order, the built-in tolerances won`t be adequate.
Unfortunately, most older houses` doors show their age. They`re either too drafty or too tight. They typically display the ravages of several attempts to get them to lock better with a variety of bolts, latches, slides, chains and the like.
One of the worst old front doors was on a farmhouse our ”This Old House” team renovated. The door had nearly lost its threshold through wear. The sidelights, which had once been a nicely multipaned decoration, had been stuffed with cardboard and covered with Plexiglas in a struggle against the oil cartel. The door`s glass panels were cracked. The knob hung from the broken lockset. The jamb was spintered. The leavings of several failed attempts to weather-strip the door were evident.
I knew we were in for trouble with this one. You can`t just replace what`s missing or broken; you often have to restore it, not just for aesthetic reasons but to make the door work right. When a pair of 100-year-old sidelights has to be replaced, you go to a mill with your specs, prepared to wait for a long time and pay a big price.
Off to the stripper
We sent the door itself off to the stripper, who for $100 removed all of its many layers of paint. The stripping process is very hard on doors. The whole door is dipped into a solution of caustic chemicals, which is terrific for getting rid of the paint but also makes the door`s various joints swell up. Then, after the door is rinsed in another solution and dried under heat, it shrinks, and this causes the joints to separate. Fixing the resulting mess requires glue and clamps.
Once the door is back on its hinges, the next step is to ”dutchman” its holes and splits-the wounds left by the previous owners in the various attempts to install locks and chains. To dutchman is to insert pieces of wood to fill in the voids, the objective being to make the repair invisible once a new coat of paint is applied over the patch. It should be done only by those who understand chisels, knives, and other woodworking tools.
After a great many man-hours, our old door was working just fine, with a new lock, new weather stripping, a new storm door and, of course, new sidelights. With a new oak threshold and some new molding, the door looked as if it had been there forever. And the whole job cost about $1,500.
Moral: Entrance doors that don`t work cost a lot to fix, and there`s no walking away from a door that doesn`t work.
Patio doors have been causing problems since they were introduced at least 50 years ago. The earliest versions were constructed of aluminum frame and ”thermal” glass-that is, two pieces of single-thickness tempered glass, or ”lights,” with an air space between them. This air space creates a measure of insulation, but the seal can break. When that happens, moisture gets into the air space and condenses, causing streaks that cannot be removed. Another problem is that the aluminum frame is an excellent conductor of cold. Such doors are cold to the touch and can actually frost up on cold nights. Newer patio doors use wooden frames to overcome that problem, as well as an improved glass sandwich to keep out the heat in the summer and the cold in the winter. The down side is that installing such doors is not cheap.
Older panes
Windows also get a lot of action. And now more than ever, people care about how well the windows keep out the cold. In most old houses, alas, the windows don`t work well at all.
In the old days you kept a window up with a stick or some other prop. This serviceable but primitive method gave way in time to the use of weighted sash cords, which generally worked pretty well (aside from needing to be replaced occasionally). But the core-and-pulley system requires side pockets or slots in the window frame and these let the cold air in. If you buy a house with sash cords, you`re buying one part of an energy hog. You can find replacement devices for the sash cords, but our experience is that such gadgets cannot hold up the heavy sashes found in many old houses.
Probably a better approach from an energy-conservation standpoint is to cover them with aluminum storm and screen windows. This is expensive, and sometimes the aluminum storms look out of place on an older home, but on balance this is usually the best approach to the problem of leaky windows.
Steel casement windows are not terribly common, but when they do show up, they`re murder. They conduct the cold, condense moisture, rarely close tightly and are difficult to get replacement parts for. Finding them in a house shouldn`t make you turn it down, but they`re not an asset, and they`ll give you trouble until you finally replace them.
