Buttons and Horns

And now we have buttons:

Buttons installed

Ultimately, we ended up going with white buttons on the crown trim, and the front porch tipped it for me: while it would be just fine to have some glinting buttons up on the crown molding, there were enough buttons on the front porch that carrying the rule out there would be kind of insane.

Buttons in place with the reeds

Nobody has seen the porch looking this complete in at least 50 years, probably closer to 80.

The crew is now going through the elaborate priming and painting process. I think the ceiling looks pretty amazing. Painted, you can't even tell where the epoxy fill is (this is in part because of intense and careful sanding).

Now Woody has turned his attention to a weird little detail on the windows.

Porch ceiling primed

On this photo of the front bay, you can see that under the upper sash there are some plain white blocks. Those fix that sash in place, because the replacement sashes are too heavy to use the weights that were in the windows, so we made the upper sashes inoperable.

block for upper sash

Anyway, I thought those were pretty ugly, and asked Woody to make them look like the horns on lots of traditional windows. So he's manufacturing a bunch of little horns to be screwed in under each window to fix the upper sashes in place.

Horns in progress

The only complication is how to get them to be secure, because the jambs of windows like this are basically hollow, so there's not much material to screw into. The horns will hold little enough weight that we're not too worried, but we do have to be careful about it.

posted by ayse on 03/13/18