How To Close Off A Window From The Outside

Y'all guys! Since I've been soooo busy with the motion and getting our firm on the marketplace, my good friend Melony fromSledgehammer Queenoffered to write a invitee post on a fabulous trick she used in one of her recent flips! You are gonna Honey this remodeling hack. And be sure to check out her blog for more than details on her awesome business firm renovations.

Howdy, I'm Melony from SledgehammerQueen! I want to thank Christy for assuasive me to guest post on The Harper House! I love reading nigh the flips that she and her husband do. I'm currently on the prowl for shiplap so I can recreate some of the projects Christy does!!

My husband and I also flip houses in the picayune town of Hooversville, PA. Our town was a mining town, and similar lots of little communities across America, the world has moved on to bigger and better. People tend to look down on communities such as this, but I've lived here for 34 years and I have to say, information technology'southward a great place to alive.

We take the beauty of the Allegheny Mountains all around us, and for a customs of 700, we accept a hardware store, 2 grocery/sundry stores, a post office, a bank and an eating establishment!! Our goal is to encourage others in surrounding communities to run across the beauty in this town and to want to live in such a wonderful community.

Today, I want to share with you our solution to one of those nagging issues- how to eliminate a window in a brick house and arrive look great on the exterior of the home; and so here's our have on this dilemma:

When renovating houses, sometimes it becomes necessary to eliminate windows to reconfigure the layout of rooms. I find this virtually often happens with kitchens. My hubby and I tend to work on old houses, so frequently, in the kitchen, in that location are doors to the basement, doors to the the dining room, doors to the hall and peradventure even the back door! Then in that location are 5 foot alpine windows and erstwhile fashioned hot h2o radiators to work around. This leaves about 3 feet of usable wall space to hang cabinets on (I exaggerate a flake, just not much).

Nosotros also tend to knock down a lot of walls to create open flooring plans, but so you have even less wall space to work with to configure the cabinet arrangement. The adept news is, since the walls are downward, now the lite from other rooms' windows tend to lite up the kitchen, so you can eliminate a window and at that place is still plenty of sunlight streaming in.

Now, here'south the dilemma- what practice you do when the house is brick? I'k okay with taking windows out when I know I will be re-siding and no i will always know a window used to exist in that location. What are your options with brick? Put a piece of wood in the opening and paint information technology to match the brick? I have always felt that information technology wasn't an pick to remove a window in brick because I just don't like this look. Then, inspiration struck!

In our Water Street House there just wasn't a logical place to put the kitchen cabinets unless we removed this window.

Now, nosotros actually eliminated this window a couple of years agone. It was located in the corner of the room abreast where the alpine white cabinet now resides.

Since we can't go back and show yous exactly how nosotros did this, my awesome married man, Bill helped me practice a mock-up of the procedure. We did the mock-upwards in an old business firm (the Riverhouse) that we haven't renovated all the same, so hold on to your hats, the following pictures are a picayune scary!! Hither's an overview of the kitchen (beautiful isn't it?).

Hither is the window we "eliminated" in our demo.

I chose this window to practise this demo on considering it was one of the only ones in Riverhouse that notwithstanding had a mini blind in it. The mini blind is an of import part of this procedure, so even though it's dirty and gross, at least I didn't take to buy one 🙂

We re-installed the mini blind brackets to the surface of the window so that we would have the maximum amount of room left subsequently the next step, which is to install particleboard over the mini blind. When we did this technique at Water Street, we painted the outside of the particleboard black (You will encounter this down below). For this demo, we just installed the particleboard unpainted.

For those of you not super familiar with circular saws, we thought we'd also bear witness you how to adapt the circular saw for the correct depth to cutting through the plywood. In the above photo, you can see how far the blade is below the guide. This would exist the proper depth to cut a thicker piece of wood.

Adjusting the blade is accomplished by releasing the lever at the back of the saw, and and so moving the blade upwards or downward depending on what yous are doing. We wanted to cut through the plywood without cutting through the sawbucks, and so you can meet, the depth of the saw needs to be very shallow as our particle board is simply vii/xvi″ thick.

After we got the right depth (higher up), we and then measured the opening of the window then marked and cutting the particleboard to fit. Disclosure – the window opening was Actually crooked, so it took us 4 adjustments to get the particleboard to fit. Hopefully your house is much straighter than this old beauty.

We so attached the particleboard to the stops at the side of the window with screws. At Water Street, Neb also caulked around the edge of the particleboard to keep grit and bugs out of the business firm.

Hither's an overview of the window covered with the particleboard. Please ignore the white paneling! (Hello 1970's). This business firm has this great bump-out on both sides of the house. Plain, I would never comprehend upwardly a window in such a cool characteristic, but once more I picked this window because it had the blind 😐

We then installed insulation over the particleboard. At the Water Street firm, the walls are 15″ thick so it was really like shooting fish in a barrel to install a nice thick layer of insulation. At this business firm (and at most houses) the walls are a standard thickness, so I removed half of the thickness of the insulation and then installed it.

Here is a close-upwards of the drywall then installed over the installation. Nosotros used a spare piece of drywall to just give you lot an idea of how the window opening would disappear and you would accept a new blank surface to work on. You can come across a glimpse of the insulation (and of course the particleboard) under the edge of the drywall.

Hither's what this window looks like from outside at present. It looks similar you have the blinds closed, only read on because at the Water Street house, it looks even more realistic.

At the Water Street holding, first we installed a brand new window and then information technology would match the other windows nosotros replaced, and deliberately left it unlocked. We then installed a brand new mini bullheaded. Leaving the window unlocked allows for future maintenance, such as keeping the inside of the window opening make clean or replacing the mini bullheaded.

I'grand sure we will have to exist contortionists to address these issues, but worst case scenario, nosotros tin simply remove the window panes, set what needs fixing and then reinstall them. I know eventually the mini blind will suffer from dry rot, just the skilful news in this case is that the window doesn't get much directly sunlight because it is shaded by the garage side by side door. So, if you lot're reading between the lines, this window had the worst view of any in the house. The other windows take nice views of the yard and the Stonycreek River which runs along the dorsum yard, so information technology would have been a much harder decision to decide to remove ane of those windows.

To terminate the kitchen walls, on the inside nosotros cutting a sail of particleboard to fit the opening and painted information technology black on one side. From the outside, doesn't it just look similar the window is open up? You are looking right at the particleboard.

Only similar in the mock-up, we then insulated the opening that was left on the interior side. Over all of this, we drywalled, painted and finished the kitchen.

Right where the refrigerator will become, the window is still there, you lot just tin't see information technology!

On the outside we take what looks like a perfectly normal window, with the blinds open (and no lights turned on). On the inside we take a consummate kitchen with room for a refrigerator. Practise you have a situation similar this at your firm? Will this assist you to solve the problem? Allow me know!

If yous would like my Free Printable on "How to Buy a House, and not a Lemon", you can find it hither. I hope you enjoyed this mail and again I would like to thank Christy from the bottom of my heart for allowing me to share this post with y'all, her crawly readers!

Thank you!

Melony @ sledgehammerqueen.com

pivot this for later on!