More demo and the window

A close up of the mess the tiles left on the wall. That's my hand chiseling at the crap stuck to it. After a while we tried power sanding instead.
When we were getting ready for the reno, we had this brilliant idea of enlarging the kitchen window. The windows in this house all need replacing anyway as they're single glazed so of course we would replace the window while doing the kitchen. But as we looked at our designs, we kept coming back to the fact that the backyard of this property, with the creek and slope and green belt, is really an amazing feature which should be showcased more. What better way to do it than to expand the windows? We decided we'd like to have the window extend over both the sink and the dishwasher.

There was a smallish snag in that we didn't actually know for sure how this house was constructed. We knew it wasn't quite standard framing, but we only had a hazy idea of how the loads were carried. We did some research, and some exploratory ripping off walls to look beneath, discovered it's mostly post and beam, and decided it was doable. All it needed was a new header.

Here is my very efficient carpenter. Roo is a jack of all trades, Mr. Handy, funny and gorgeous to boot. Office warrior by day, power tool wizard by night.

That's the new header. Gorgous, ain't it? Notice that it's daytime. After the header went in and a bunch of magic voodoo was done involving kings, studs, and cripples (that's window framing talk), Roo cut a huge freaking hole in the wall and got ready to install the new window.

Um, how did it get to be night? And if you look close it appears that Roo is breathing fire. It is bloody cold by this time. (It dawns on us that maybe cutting holes in walls in December is not such a great idea.) Roo's on the deck, getting the caulking in. The new window finally went in around 10 pm at night. You would not believe how many times we measured, re-measured, and measured again, to make sure this sucker would fit and that we wouldn't have some collossal gaps around it.

Hurray! It fits!
That's my mom - our handy assistant - outside in the watchman's cap.

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To be continued.