The Rocinante project has involved a lot of scraping. Scraping off the layers of time in paint peels, for hours, upon hours, upon hours. Two scrapers get used the most — be it scraping the paint inside the house in preparation for painting, scraping out the putty from each of the 24 sash windows I painstakingly restored the year we moved here — or indeed, scraping the exterior siding crackling with peeling paint — my current project.
Yes, there is some joy to scraping — particularly when the paint is literally peeling off the siding and all it needs is a nudge to curl into long strips — like the childhood joy of peeling Elmer’s glue off the palms of your hands.
My elbows have paid the price for this endless scraping — they ached for about 18 months after I completed the mammoth window project (the summer of 2023, when we arrived, a basic necessity if we wanted any chance of keeping the house warm that winter)— it involved restoring 24 sash windows (which include two parts each, with 1-2 panes per)… It seemed like the project would never end, but miraculously I restored all the downstairs windows in about 4 months that first summer.
Now the elbows have healed, so here I go again, a glutton for punishment. The current goal is to paint the front of the house (since the windows and roof are all new, the siding of the house is literally begging on hands and knees for us to relieve it of its indignity with a fresh coat of paint. Since we cleared the bittersweet vines and thicket that used to greet our our visitors when arriving at Rocinante (vines which blocked any view of the side of the house), now you get a fantastic impression of peeling paint before even getting to the house — not a very dignified welcome. So if we can also, possibly, paint the side you first see when driving in, we will…
The side of the house has a pointy roofline, with a window in the apex — which is also in need of a facelift — since none of the second floor windows have been restored yet. So, Beau got to work extracting the window from the “sewing room” — or so we call the adorable little guest room in the eaves, overlooking the veggie garden and the road.
I was actually quite excited to restore the sewing room window — I haven’t tackled a window since our first summer here two years ago, and having just one window, not twenty four to complete, felt manageable (even with my ailing elbow)!
Out came the window restoring gear from its shelf, me wondering if the linseed putty and linseed oils and paints would still be useable after overwintering for 2 years in the barn. Would I have enough points to fix the window panes? Would the shellac we use to prime the lip where the glass and putty lie, still be useable?The process starting to come back to me.
I opened up the linseed oil products, which have so many incredible properties: at first glance it looked like the putty had hardened beyond use, but I was able to peel off the outer skin that had formed, and inside was a perfectly pliable ball of putty. Same with the paint: it looked like it had fully dried out — but we were able to peel back a film that had formed across the top, and underneath was the thick, oily black paint, which we could soften even more with a bit of raw linseed oil from a jug.
The oil is a wonderful product to use on wood: breathable and pliable and great protection from the elements — particularly worth the extra effort on such an important fixture as a window. The linseed oil putty makes a great seal on your window panes. It’s also lovely to work with: you massage the ball of putty until it is warm and soft, and then apply it with graceful hand gestures to dispense it as you cover up the tiny metal pins. Finally, my beloved scraper slices the angled putty edge between the glass and the frame.
Everything was coming back to me and I happily prepared both windows, extracting the glass, stripping the wood with the help of a heat lamp, and painting them a nice Farrow and Ball Old White for the interior side, with black linseed oil paint on the exterior.
But then tragedy happened.
After extracting all four panes of glass, scraping off the paint from the frames and panes, and puttying the glass back into place, I was gently positioning the last of the 4 panes of glass, lightly pressing it down on its bed of putty, just prior to pinning it, when the unthinkable happened. The old glass broke in two pieces, straight across the windowpane. My spirits sank. The glass, and my heart, were broken.
I remembered the multiple heartbreaks of 2023 — as gently as I tried to tackle this project, the the old wavy glass loves to crack or break. Normally these mishaps occur when you were scraping off the putty and paint to extract the glass from the frame, often under the heat lamp. But for the glass to break at this last step of the process was a new low.
I scurried through the house looking for Beau. “Disaster!” I announced. He was familiar with the problem, and normally it would mean ordering a new pane from our glass supplier an hour drive away in Ellsworth. Adding a week delay to the completion of this window, at least. Unless, of course, we could find the perfect sized pane in one of the old broken window frames still stored in the barn.
I had mined most of the intact glass panes during the initial window process — finding beautiful wavy glass in some of the old storm windows — sometimes getting it cut to fit in Ellsworth (we tried our hand at cutting glass and failed!).
But lo and behold, Beau headed to our stash with his measuring tape, and miraculously found one that was exactly the right size — with the added bonus that the putty holding it into its old broken frame was already so loose no tools were necessary to free it. I wiped off the years of accumulated dust, pressed it into the sewing room window frame, and magically it sank happily into its place. Thus, I was able to complete both the top and bottom of the window today. (Well, almost complete — one more coat of black linseed paint, and some touch ups still needed.)
So now, back to regularly scheduled scraping — the perfect activity for internal monologues and debates about how to navigate the close of the year, as it draws ever nearer with the onset of Fall. Three cans of house paint are on the way: beautiful barn red. Stay tuned for part 2 of the epic scraping saga, and thank you for reading.
Amazing