Window Repair as a Labor of Love

By Laurel Margerum

Growing up, I did not pay much attention to the 120 to 140-year-old windows at my family’s seasonal camp in Maine. I was much more interested in the world to be explored on the other side of the glass, from the rocky islands to be reached by dinghy to the mossy hiking trails explored on foot. I first took notice of the windows when my mother pointed out an iridescence splash of light from their wavy glass on the hardwood floor. As I got older, I also began to understand how much work my parents and my mother’s parents put into maintaining the house. By the time I went to graduate school for Urban Planning and Historic Preservation, I was determined to contribute to the caretaking of the house that had always been my favorite place in the world. One thing needing urgent caretaking was our windows. My grandmother had restored them once in the 1970s after she and my grandfather purchased the camp. But almost fifty years later, most needed reglazing again, and no one really knew how to do it.

During the summer between my first and second years of grad school, I interned with Maine Preservation’s Summer Fellows program. The program included a five-week placement with Bagala Window Works, a premier historic window restoration firm based in Westbrook, Maine. Over the course of the placement, I learned how remove old glazing putty and glass (in one piece!), prepare sashes for reglazing, reglaze with linseed oil putty, and repaint. Those five weeks were some of the most rewarding, valuable, and fun weeks of my life. I loved the challenge and endurance of glass removal and the quiet concentration of painting lines. I learned what tools to use and the order of operations for each of the many steps in the window restoration process. Working with a wonderful and inspiring group of women and men was a great bonus too.

When I finished my summer internship, I hurried up to the camp with my new skills, tools, and visions. Working on an old picnic table in a corner of our covered porch presented new challenges, and I had to figure out new techniques to accomplish tasks outside of a professional restoration shop. I also had to get a better handle on glazing. Despite some intermittently fat and wobbly putty application, I finished three windows during the first summer. And they worked! No rain seeped in during storms, and when I came back after their first hard Maine winter, they looked like they had just been painted yesterday. The summer after graduate school and before moving to Hawaiʻi, I set out to finish six windows with the assistance of my willing boyfriend, who proved to be an excellent sander. Techniques improved, and my dad, assigned with the most stressful and emotionally taxing task, learned how to cut glass I salvaged from old sashes under ours and our neighbor’s porches.

After three summers of window restoration projects, ten windows are fully restored and ready for another fifty years of service in the house. There are at least ten more windows on the urgently-need-restoration list to fill many summers to come. Now I spend a significant amount of time each summer in a respirator and old foul weather gear in my window workshop corner of the porch, but I do not mind it at all. Each summer I look forward to selecting windows for restoration and doing my part to take care of the old house, just as my grandparents did and my parents continue to do. And after two weeks of challenging work, nothing beats the view out of a weathertight, freshly restored window with gleaming wood and perfectly clean wavy glass shining even brighter than before.