Tag Archives: security

Masonry and windows – Part 1

general construction, , ,

The season and the approaching cold weather begin to dictate the various tasks at hand. One of them is the masonry repair work around the 1st floor windows.

Almost all the 1st floor windows have window guards. These have been sitting there for a long time with no maintenance and have slowly begun to corrode.

That includes the anchors that are let into the first wythe of the masonry wall. When metal starts to corrode, it begins to expand with an amazing force, pushing some of the surrounding brick work out.

We decided to remove the guards and restore them like we did with the basement windows.

To save time, I called in our mason, who was happy to stop by and take care of the repairs.

He cut and removed the damage brick, removed the guards, which I stowed away in the basement for the time being, and patched the holes with salvaged common brick. As with all masonry work on our old building, I was careful to make sure that we use the right lime based mortar.

This took care of most of the windows, except two, which are a little more involved. More on those in the next posts.

Restoring window guards

general construction, ,

We had them on most basement and first floor windows. And we like them because they provide convenient protection against casual break-ins.

bsmt-win-03

The problem is that they were very old and very rusty. The worst corrosion manifested itself at the bottom of the basement window guards, where they were closest to the ground. The ends of most of the horizontal bottom bars, which were mortared into the masonry wall, were completely rusted off, leaving the guards only anchored at the top.

I pulled all the guards out and put them into the scrap metal pile when we were replacing the brick around the bottom of the house. No more guards in the basement windows equaled less security and we felt the urgency to organize replacements.

We looked into complete new guards and even came up with our own design. That proved rather costly. A home improvement store offered off-the-shelf guards that would have fit our basement window sizes. They, however, where somewhat flimsy, looked tacky, and were obviously shipped in from China. We really wanted to keep our money more local.

I took another look at the scrap pile and began to wonder if the original guards could somehow be fixed up. That put me right into research mode.

I found a sandblasting place that would remove all the old crud off the bars. I looked at the guards with our friend UV, who is a metal working and installed the pipe columns. We decided that they could be restored, once they were cleaned.

This fits with our objective of maximizing reuse, allows us to spend our money locally, and lo and behold, turned out to be a rather economic option.

The guards came back spotless after the sandblasting and were handed right away to UV. We were lucky he was able to squeeze us into his schedule.

He fixed all the corroded ends on the horizontal bars by welding new L-brackets to them, through which I would anchor the guards back into the masonry wall. I picked up the restored and primed guards, which were now ready to be pained.

win-guards-03

We opted for a color that resembles limestone and our new windows. It turned out to be a good pick.

The paint was barely dry when I got back to the house with sturdy masonry anchors. I put the hammer drill back to work, squeezed the socket wrench, touched up the paint and we were done.

win-guards-04 win-guards-05

It feels good to have that little bit of security back, just in time to get the heating and plumbing work started.

Securing the House

starting up, ,

Like we have not secured the house before… (see also 04/08, 04/10 and 04/14/2009 posts). But this time it’s a little different, as the house is now ours for real. We removed the Realtor’s lock box and replaced the dead bolt lock on the front screen door and front door. The screen door is a nice, very sturdy, decorative wrought iron piece, which we like a lot.  I ordered a dumpster and we are now ready to start the big clean-up in the basement.

After a couple of days, I find the screen door and front door unlocked upon my arrival! I questioned my sanity for a minute: Did I really forget to look both doors last time? I could not figure out how someone could have gotten in, until I noticed that the narrow bay window facing the front porch was forced open, but then carefully closed again.

Nothing else in the house was missing, damaged or altered. My guess is that whoever went in must have been looking for tools, which I always take back with me at the end of the day. There is really nothing in the house right now that is worth taking away. Even the remaining copper piping in the walls is not worth much since the prices for scrap metals collapsed late last year.

I barricaded and boarded up the narrow bay window, which, in hindsight, was clearly the easiest entry point into the house. I wonder what other easy entry points there are? Because there is nothing in the house to steal, another forced entry could be a plus – it will point us to the next best easy entry point and allow us to improve security.

Of course we’ll need to figure out something different once we have building materials stored inside. We’ve started a little security to-do list:

  • Install solid back doors on every floor with proper dead bolt locks
  • Get temporary electricity set up
  • Install sensor-triggered security lighting on all four corners of the house.

Will that be deterrent enough? We don’t know but we surely will find out.