Insulation and storm door replacement among the Miller family household projects
We’ve been in replacement mode at the Miller homes in the past month.
Virtually all of it involved winter weatherization, even if that wasn’t the original purpose for the work.
Case in point is work we did to the living room ceiling of Daughter No. 2’s new-to-her old house. A small section of the ceiling over a bay window had been damaged by a leak in the past, so she tore out the damaged plaster and asked Drywall Dad to help fix it.
She also said that while opening up the ceiling, she noticed that the wind whipping across her street that day was also blowing through her living room — while the windows and doors were closed.
That is one of those moments that falls into the category of “listen to what your house is telling you, and don’t dismiss it without investigating.”
A few weeks went by, and the living room breeze persisted on windy days, and, wisely, my daughter mentioned it to me again before the day we planned to cut a piece of wallboard to fit over the exposed lath. I picked up some insulation ahead of that project, suspecting that we would need it.
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Before fitting the drywall into place, I removed enough lath to stick my head into the space above the bay window, and what to my wondering eyes did I see, but at least 8 feet of wide-open space between me and the front-porch soffit vents. I could see daylight though the vents and feel the breeze from a northeast wind blowing across my face.
We definitely needed that insulation, which I cut to fit and stuffed up through my peephole and worked into the rafters above the bay window before screwing the drywall into place.
Meanwhile, back at the family farm, Daughter No. 3 had made plans to replace the storm doors on her old house, as well as the weatherstripping pile in the triple-track storm windows my grandpa installed on her house at least 50 years ago.
She ordered ProVia doors with built-in screens. Pull down on the top storm window, and a hidden screen magically appears in its place. Pull up on the bottom storm window, and a screen magically appears. Push both storm windows into place, and the screens retract into hiding places built into the door frame.
The doors aren’t cheap, but they are engineered and built by Ohioans who understand that the weather in Ohio requires the ability to make such a quick change — like in the past few weeks, when we saw lows in the 40s or high 30s at night (storm windows up!) and 75 during the day (screens up!).
We both read the directions and followed them to install the front door.
Given that we were working on an old house, we expected surprises, and we found them.
Someone who installs storm doors for a living would have had it done in short order, I’m sure. For us, it took most of a day.
Neither of us had installed a storm door before, so we were being extremely careful — measuring three or four times before cutting, for starters. But we also found, as we often do while working on old houses, that things didn’t line up as perfectly as the pictures in the direction booklet.
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The original wooden doorframe had a decorative lip on each side and a dip in the middle. That required some shimming to fasten the new, aluminum storm door frame to the wood.
Eventually, it became a one-person job, which my daughter took over while I went off to work on another project.
Within days of finishing the door installation, she received the fuzzy strips of mohair-like pile that serve as the gasket between the thin, aluminum sashes in the triple-track storm windows.
Triple tracks are so named because they contain two storm windows and a screen that slides easily in their tracks and can be raised and lowered from inside the house. That technology replaced old-fashioned storm windows and screens that had to be removed and replaced manually, and then stored in the garage or attic until the next season.
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Over time, the triple track’s thin strips of fuzzy gasket material that kept the wind out and made the sashes easy to slide had been worn down to nothing. They were no longer keeping the breeze at bay.
So my daughter spent evenings and free time pulling the pile from its channels in the sash and sliding in new strips. She noticed an immediate difference in wind reduction.
Speaking of replacements, a couple of readers who read last month’s column about my joyful experience fixing our bathroom faucets noted that Delta and Moen provide lifetime warranties (as do some other manufacturers of plumbing fixtures), so I wouldn’t have needed to buy replacement cartridges.
This is true! I forgot that point during my concern about stopping a leak, and I’m not sure that I would have gone that route even if I had remembered, because the faucet was leaking severely, and we couldn’t wait even a day to get it fixed.
Barring the need for anymore emergency repairs, I’ll plan ahead in the future and contact the manufacturer for parts. Many thanks to the alert readers who sent reminders.
Alan Miller is a Denison University journalism instructor and former Dispatch editor who writes about old-house repair and historic preservation.
@youroldhouse
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Insulation and a new storm door among the Millers' winterization jobs
