Minwax High Performance Wood Hardener

Get Your Wood Hard with Minwax

Our fourth house was our oldest yet, older than the previous one by something like ninety years. I'm here to say that there is joy to life in a Victorian-era farmhouse more than a hundred years old, especially architectural details never seen in the stapled-together tract houses we of the 99% live in. Ours had plaster medallions, leaded-glass windows, plinth blocks on the moldings everywhere in the house, and ceiling lights whose every socket had its own switch (that no one shorter than 5'-10" could reach without a ladder) .

Turret with (repaired) window complex. 

Owning old houses also has its woes. For one, there's the shortage of plumb walls and square corners - though I once lived in a ranch house built in the 1980s that wasn't all that square, either. Second is having to find visit the local architectural salvage yard every weekend for replacing things they don't sell at Home Depot. Then there's dry rot. Pure, simple, dry rot, the natural enemy of wood that's exposed to moisture for a century or so. Dry rot is surely the bane of old houses' existence.

An eighty-MPH wind gust blew in one of the windows in our turret. More accurately, it blew in a window complex of perhaps a dozen panes, half curved. Broken glass was everywhere, but for the most part, the frame was intact, with only a few cracks I could clamp and glue plus a few rotted spots. The rotted spots troubled me, because re-glazing windows in a rickety frame is courting disaster. How was I going to replace a few spongy muntins in a frame four feet wide and four feet high without replacing the whole works?