Antique Window Refurb
About a month ago on a trip to Utah for the Vintage Whites Antique Market, I picked up this great Antique Window. For a while I have wanted one, I really wanted a four panned window, but the price on this one was just to good to pass up and it had some really fun original hardware.
I had really hoped that I wouldn’t have to pull out the glass and re-glaze the window (Ill explain what that is in a minute), but once we got it home I realized I was going to need to.
I went through several ideas of what I wanted to do with it; should I just clean it up and tape some pictures to it and use is as an ornate picture frame, just hang it as is, take the glass out and put chicken wire in it (I love chicken wire), paint it. Finally I decided to turn in into a gift for The Hubs.
We started dating on April 20th 2012 and he proposed to me a year later. So April 20th is sort of an anniversary for us. I thought it would be great to print out the lyrics to our first dance in vinyl and put them on the window to hang in our living room. The Hubs was helping me at this point, with no idea I wanted to give it to him as a gift.
After a little discovery, which by the way should always be your first step; look closely, see what exactly you’re working with, we realized that the glazing (Glazing and Glazing Push Points are what is used to hold single pane windows in their frame) were pretty shot. If the glazing looks cracked or large pieces are missing you may want to think about removing the old glazing and re-doing it.
I love the look of old things and I love getting to reuse them in fun creative ways, but I also like safety, and the last thing I want is for the window to be hanging on the wall and accidentally get bumped and have the whole piece of glass fall out and break (probably not likely but, better safe than sorry).
Once you have removed all the old glazing and taken the window out make sure to really clean out the lip of the frame of any remaining glazing, I used my Dremil Tool for this part. This will help your glass is seated flush and tight when you add the new glazing.
The glazing can be found at any hardware store, it will be in the painting department (usually). I used a latex glazing, it comes in a long tube like caulking. You put the glazing on just like you would caulk a bath tube or tile. Once you put the glazing all around the edges of your window, you will need to tool the glazing to smooth it out with a putty knife.
A good friend of mine has a craft cutter and she was amazing enough to print out the words I wanted on some vinyl I bought on Amazon. After about three hours of weeding all the text (weeding the the process of taking out all the little internal pieces of letters, like the middle of the O), I was ready to go. As you can see there is a ton of text here, if it is your first time using vinyl I would not recommend going with this much text or with this scripty font.
Like all new things the first time is very scary; riding a bike, driving a car, eating at Casa Bonita (that’s a Coloradan joke) and the entire time I was working with the vinyl there was a little voice in the back of my head saying “This isn’t going to work Nichole, I hope you have a backup plan!” (which I didn’t) but miraculously things went perfectly, the window looks amazing and The Hubs was totally surprised.
With Mothers Day and Fathers Day, as well as wedding season, coming up this type of wall art makes a great gift. Like everything in the Vintage Frontier, there are endless possibilities.
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