This was a challenging job which revealed hundreds of years’ worth of workmanship and differing approaches to repairs.
The first thing we noted was that the sashes pre-dated the frame of the window. Originally a farmhouse, the building was acquired by the Rothschild family in the mid C19 and presumably the sashes were re-purposed from another of their properties. The square chamfered blocks or knuckles in the corners of the mouldings are a design que taken from some of the very earliest glazed windows in England, but the extremely thin rails and stiles date the sashes from the late C18. For the huge mouldings that make up the frame, some over 7 inches deep and nearly 5 inches wide, a local carpenter’s yard would have used wooden handplanes, scratches and gouges to form the profiles before transporting them to site where the frame of the window would have been assembled by cutting mortices, tenons and drawbores to have the window fit neatly into the sloped original timber frame of the farmhouse. These features give the building it’s unique history and make the window itself more-or-less irreplaceable.
Knowing that the window sill was in urgent need of attention, we carefully removed the sashes. This exposed several old repairs to the sashes, as well as a more recent extensive repair to the jamb on the right side. The sill itself came out in damp, rotten fistfuls and needed complete replacement.
The main concern was that the tenons on most of the upright members had rotten away in their mortises. The first job was to re-tenon these components, including their drawbores and pegs.
With the jambs and mullions back in place, we could start work on any mouldings that needed replacing. The large size and offset shape of the mouldings meant that the only reasonable method to produce the replacements was with handtools, just as the originals were. This included the need to scribe the new mouldings to the original head of the frame using gouges.
With everything prepared, we could turn our attention to the sill replacement before fitting the replacement mouldings perfectly between the head and new sill.
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