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As some of you know, we found and bought our rather unusual house in 2003. Originally designed by a student of Frank Lloyd Wright, and built by the Sifton family in 1948, this Usonian style ranch (extended in 1992-1997) was built from solid 3/4 inch pine, inside hand-oiled, outside painted. Through leftover drawings, photos and additional strange coincidences - Frank, the paint store owner where I purchased paint recently, rented the house for two years in the early 70s - we uncovered some interesting history of this house.
One of the things I learned recently from Frank is that the house was off-white in the 70s. Which I had suspected while preparing to paint the exterior. It had been painted only once more since that time, I assume right after the second owners bought it. They had it spray-painted in a reddish earth tone, a color scheme we really liked.
After we bought the house from the third owners, we found it in great shape overall, except for the exterior paint of the original house, as well as some rot on overhanging eaves on the north side. Here's some pictures of what the house looked like before we signed the contracts ;-)
 As was apparent right away, the paint was peeling off quite dramatically. Lucky for us, the underlying wood was in solid condition, something we checked before signing on the dotted line. It was one of those things we would fix in the near future...
Well, the future was finally here, this summer and fall of 2006. The rot at the eaves was removed and repaired; the original roof covered with a whole new roofing layer of additional insulation and EPDM, a synthetic rubber; the leaky gutters were replaced; and it ended with painting the exterior of the house.
Each home improvement project always teaches me something new, in addition to honing my general skills. With the exterior pinting, I learned that it is a LOT more work than I thought, and I probably should not have done this all by myself. All exterior wood was scraped, cleaned and repainted with two coats of Benjamin Moore MoorGuard LowLustre in the color Audubon Russet, a slightly lighter reddish earth tone. The detail and trim will be recovered in BM's Soft Gloss Tudor Brown.
I also learned to reglaze window panes, something I had never attempted before. Here's a detail of what the mullions of my office windows looked like.
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As you can see, the paint is curling or has fallen off the mullions completely,
and the putty seal is crumbling and cracking and was actually missing
in whole stretches of the window. Needless to say, this
causes cold to enter through the windows more than you would want, and
the exposed wood - although not overly exposed to the elements due to
our overhanging eaves - is not getting any better over time.
I removed all paint and all putty using scrapers, a glazier's knife and a heat gun.
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The now bare sashes needed to be primed before resetting the
glass with new glazier's putty. I used boiled linseed oil (blo) for the first six windows, and decided some 1# shellac I had
lying around for the last one, just to see how it would hold up over time.
The picture on the left shows the cleaned up windows with newly applied glazier's putty.
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As is customary, all exposed wood and putty needs to get covered in paint, while overlapping onto each glass pane by a few millimeters, really sealing the putty. This prevents moisture from creeping between the glass and the putty over time.
Masking seemed the most sure way to achieve this... Little did I realize how LONG this takes. Oh well, next time I'll skip the masking and just try to paint precisely by hand ;-) Here's the masked windows up close.
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And the final result after removing all that tape. Phew.
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This set of windows should be good to go for the immediate future. Coming spring, I will apply the same treatment for our meditation room next to my office, doing all those 12 windows! Here's a final overview picture, just to share some of the crisis and victory of this not-so-small project.
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Pieter's Blog 
