We mentioned in an earlier post that we plan on having trimless windows in a lot of our rooms. The trim in the living room and dining room are original to the house, and we plan on keeping those. The rest of the house, however, has a much less fancy trim that we don’t like. Here’s a before picture from the guest bedroom during our first official day of renovating:
They’re pretty much just cheap pine boards slapped together and painted white. They’re not hideous — they’re just blah. So while I was busy de-plastering a wall, Bradley tackled the guest bedroom windows:
We had already removed the trim a few weekends ago when we were tired of looking at it.
Bradley removed the wood frame surrounding the windows. Our goal is to make the window framing flush with the rest of the wall around it and the frame we had was beveled, so we couldn’t just drywall over it.
Bradley used a small piece of drywall as his guide on how deep to set the new frame, and then he nailed in some new wood.
Once the wood was set up on all four sides of the window, Bradley screwed pieces of drywall to the frame. He covered the inside of the window:
And then he covered over the frame itself so you can’t see any wood:
Once he had drywall up on the top and sides, he made sure everything was level. Then he screwed vinyl corner beads to the edges:
This will give us a really straight, clean edge once we plaster over it this weekend.
Even though it’s not totally done yet, we though it would be fun to do a before / in progress comparison. Check it out:
You might have noticed that Bradley didn’t drywall the bottom of the window:
That’s because we’re making concrete ledges that will sit across the bottom. The piece of wood is a guide that shows how thick the ledge will be. We’re still debating whether we want to splurge on white concrete or go with a standard grey. We can’t buy the white stuff locally, so we’ll have to wait until we’re back in Brooklyn to stock up on that. Either way, we’ll do a concrete tutorial soon!
What we learned from this project:
- We’re incredibly picky.
There’s a reason we moved into a fixer-upper and it’s not just because we love smashing plaster walls. We looked at a few move-in ready houses and they just didn’t seem very us. So glad we decided to go with a house we can tear up and rebuild to be perfect for us!
This is sweet. You know, even in modern houses, trim is usually just a lazy given due to the possibility of bad craftsmanship on the part of one sub or another. We’re working on a modern new construction that I wish we could do this to, but without more direct control and more budget, there’s too many things that could go badly. Not a problem here!
Agreed! Trim, to us, just seems like a way to cover up the boo-boos. Sorry you can’t do this now too — but you could always sharpen up your drywall & plastering skills and get back to it later!
Haha, I wish! We can’t contractually do that. This is speaking from an architect POV in a traditional design-bid-build situation, should have probably elaborated a bit on that. We can chew out the general contractor if we want though! DIY (and design-build in the industry sense) circumvents the usual BS/red-tape that makes any sort of traditional construction so hard to get done.
Ahh, gotcha! Thought you meant a house you were having built to live in!
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It’s up to you of course, it’s your home, but have you considered putting in some stained glass? DGUs are only needed in places that steam up like bathrooms and bedrooms, and they can be made to spec or, you look pretty handy, you could make them. Other wise you can just use coloured glass in wooden frames. It isn’t much more expensive than clear glass, sometimes people give you glass (try freecycle) and it’s really classy, at least I think so. I’m not touting for business, i won’t come to America. But I admire your DIY-ness.