The bottleneck in the window project, aside from all the repointing -- and there's no way around that -- has been cutting the curved sash pieces. Long story short, I'd been cobbling together a Frankenjig to cut the interior curves, adding pieces and drilling new holes as needed for different radii and material thicknesses. It worked, but it always took forrrrrrrrrever to setup. 

Why?

Because there weren't enough fixed or easily adjustable points. Everything was a custom setup, and that usually meant way too much measuring, drilling, driving screws, chopping parts off, adding parts on, etc. 

So I finally made a jig that should speed things up tremendously. 

I started with 1/2" plywood, 30" wide and 60" long. It sits on a simple 2x4 frame, with the 2x4s jointed and planed to get everything flat, square, and straight.

On one end, I screwed down a milled 2x4; this provides a flat, straight, square reference surface to rest the work pieces against. In the previous jig I'd get the workpiece centered on the rest piece and then drive some screws, through the meat that gets cut off in future milling, to hold it in place. I'll keep doing that for now; in the future, I'll make this adjustable as well. 

On the other end I added a 1/2" drill bit to serve as the sled shaft. 1/2" is a pretty good size for this setup; it's big and solid, and makes the math I have to do when setting up the jig pretty easy. The Frankenjig had something random, like a 5/16" drill bit, which made the math not so simple. If I'd have had a piece of 1/2" diameter steel laying around I'd have used it, but I didn't; the drill bit works just as well.

That was the easy part. The sled took a little more effort and thought. 

That gave me the sled table and the sled. If I was cutting the same radius in the same sized work piece over and over and over, this would have been fine. 

But all my cuts are different due to slight variations in window size. The whole point of this jig was for it to be adjustable; with the shaft fixed at one end, the sled length needed to be changed, and easily. Enter the sliding dovetails. ​

The plywood piece that the router sits on (yellow), its undercarriage (green + orange) is where the adjustability lies. Without getting into the weeds of woodworking terminology, the green pieces got wedge-shaped slots cut in their sides, and the orange pieces, rails really, were milled to have an identically wedge-shaped piece protruding from one side. Long story short, this allows the green pieces to slide along the orange pieces (or the orange pieces to slide along the green pieces). Adjustability. 

Everything's a little too snug, but some light sanding should take care of that. I don't want the movable parts to be all loosey-goosey, but I need fine adjustments to be made easily...right now, it takes some force. 

You might be thinking to yourself "but if the sled adjustments are easily made, what will keep that setup locked in place during router work?". Fair question. 

​It might be tricky to explain, but I'll give it a go.

Referencing the colorful design above, I drilled a hole through the green piece nearest the shaft and installed a threaded insert on its bottom, where the piece slides across the table. 

I had a screw and knob assembly (carriage bolt + plywood star-shaped knob) leftover from the router table project, and I cut a circular washer out of OSB. Luckily, the carriage bolt was the exact right length to fit through the washer, through the slot I cut in the sled, through the piece of wood that moves around the shaft, and can be threaded snugly into the threaded insert. 

Long story short, I can get the sled set to whatever length (radius) I need and them a few turns of the knob locks the adjustable section to the piece that's fixed to the shaft.  ​

That's the setup. I still need to come up with a way to make the work piece position adjustable and I need to add a couple stabilizer wings to the sled (she's a little top heavy with the router in it), but for now, this simple setup alone should speed things up quite a bit. Kinda hoping I get to use it for a storm window build tomorrow. 

2024 was a weird year for the rehab; by some measures a lot was accomplished, and by other measures...not so much. 

Some of 2024's lack of progress was due to time spent with a new puppy (who is now the size of a small pony) I got in December 2023, none of which I regret.    

As it turns out, Farley is a total velcro dog, and on more than one occasion - especially early in the year - I wound up spending a lot of weekend hours on the couch with him snuggled up next to me. Farley is my 4th dog, all of which I've adopted when they were between 8 and 12 weeks old; I know from experience that the more time ya spend with them as puppies, the easier the road becomes as they get older.  

Now Farley is a big boy, 100+ pounds, and the return on all the the couch time investment is a dog that listens to me pretty well, can handle being off-leash, takes care of his big sister, plays fetch, and guards the house and yard without hesitation. He's a keeper. 

But really, what got me in 2024 was the windows. I've talked enough about them.

​As a means of increasing the likelihood of more noticeable results in 2025, 2025 is going to be the year of finishing projects I've already started, starting with the windows. Then the parapet. Then it's on to projects I've wanted to get to, or finish, for a long time.​

Painting the porch will be pretty straightforward, but there's a porch wall that I never addressed: the wall that has the porch's original doorway. 

Somebody got rid of the door and filled in the doorway with 2x4 framing, plywood sheathing, and a drafty ol; window. The window needs to go away, along with the plywood, and I'd like to redo the doorway as sort of a faux door. That ought to be a simple carpentry job, but sometimes with old houses...nothing is as simple as it might appear to be.

I don't know yet how I want to tackle the lattice, but the bottom edges just kinda hang there and don't provide a real clean look. Throwing some greenery in front of it all would solve the problem, but I'm a whole lot better at building things than I am at keeping plants alive. I have a feeling I'll wind up pouring some little concrete knee walls around all three sides to keep storm runoff out, and provide the lattice with a solid surface I can frame it to.

After that, paint. Someday I'll get around to putting some furniture out there so I can actually use the space.

Then it's on to the fireplaces. The house used to have 3, or maybe 4, now it's got 2 with chimneys that are still mostly intact and, if I really wanted to get after it, usable. ​

​For now, I'll settle for repointing the chimneys and putting in some flu dampers that actually work.

They're not real decorative chimneys, I may change that just a little bit. Regardless, the flu damper on the right has been open as long as I've lived here and as a result, the firebox below it collects rain, leaves, and acorns. 

You could argue that there are more pressing needs on the repointing front, but sometimes I have to get out of the rut of doing things that aren't always a whole lot of fun and tackle something I really have some interest in doing. With two of these fireplace in the front/main section of the house, it'd be kinda cool to be able to burn something (big candles, not wood...for now) in them. 

If I get through all of those plans with any time to spare, I'll start dealing with the front facade. She doesn't need a TON of attention, but in spots...she does. The foundation limestone is some low-hanging fruit that I wouldn't mind repointing, which could probably be knocked out in a weekend or two. 

Somebody repointed it previously with something that doesn't even look or feel like mortar, and did a pretty sloppy job. I don't know that I can clean all of it off the face of the stone, but I'm pretty sure I can make it look like it's supposed to. 

Of course...about a year ago I'm pretty sure I posted something here that had about the same set of plans, and that didn't shake out - at all - as hoped. So who knows...I may very well still be building windows a year from now. 

I had high hopes for 2024. The to-do list was lengthy and I got around to...almost none of it. 

It was the windows. What started as a sash-building project turned into an exhaustive reworking of 3 foundation walls, and I'm still not done. 2 window openings have windows, albeit without brick mould or storms, 1 window open has a jamb and some plywood covering the opening. I don't wanna talk about it.

The parapet was in terrible shape, and looked like it needed to be rebuilt many years ago. It also looked like somebody had tried at one point but didn't do a very good job. I rebuilt the 2 sections to the right last year, and knew from experience that the only way to properly address the parapet was to dismantle the entire thing and start over.  

I repointed the wall beneath the parapet a couple summers ago, which was my first time doing a full tear out and rebuild of a brick arch. It was a pretty nerve wracking experience given how much the wall had delaminated, but the end result is passable. 

I wish I hadn't had put that sloped mortar bed on top of the lower cornice, but I was matching the previous work. I didn't yet have the confidence in what I was doing to freelance, so it is what it is. If the cornice brick is done correctly, with a little slope away from the house, that extra mortar on top isn't necessary. Somebody did that to the upper cornice as well, which you'll see in a pic or two. I'm not replicating those sloped mortar bed details, none of which can be seen from the ground (so I don't really care that I did some work I wish I hadn't done).  

So...yeah, rough shape. It didn't take too many hours, or any power tools, to get the wall disassembled. 

If you look closely, in the upper middle part of the previous pic, you can see how I'm flashing the roof. The existing roof membrane goes up and sort of wraps over the top of the parapet, which means 2 bends over a relatively short distance (not ideal for long term sustainability), and then some kind of liquid flashing goop was smeared all over the top of the parapet, I guess to seal up where the membrane ended on the top of the parapet. It's sloppy, sloppy workmanship, and the correct way to flash the roof, despite not having a lot of parapet to work with, is to throw some metal flashing into the brick and wrapping over the top of the roof membrane. This is also the most time consuming part of the work; there's a silly number of layers of roof membrane/covering, which means there isn't a lot of 'give' to any of it, and I have to do some custom metal work to get around the corners. 

Long story short, I came close. I only have the flashing and 1 more course of brick to do, as well as a little mortar top coat in some places, but I ran out of good weather so while the scaffold still stands, the walk boards are in the basement and the parapet is covered in plastic. I need a weekend with weather above 40° to get everything buttoned up, but I probably won't get that weekend any time soon.

Which means...back to the window slog.