Labor Day Scrape - Day Two

I didn't mean to rip out the brick molding around this window today. The windows were going to be a project for another day, but when I climbed the ladder to scrape the paint off the panel just above, I found that the molding up there was soft and rotten, which made me climb down to check out the rotten molding I had already seen in the corners down there ...

I'm easily distracted. It's a flaw I've learned to live with by giving in occasionally, and I figured today it wouldn't matter much if I took a break from scraping to pry off the old brick molding, cut some new molding to fit and finish off this one window so I wouldn't lie awake during the next all-night rain shower, wondering how much water was getting in through the rot.

Brick molding is remarkably easy to remove; just set the foot of a wrecking bar against the edge where you know there's a gap, tap it into the gap with a hammer, then lean back and let the bar lever it away from the house. Wrecking bars are so monstrously useful that I have two. When I pried the gap open with the first, I slipped the foot of the other wrecking bar in above it, leaned back again to open the gap further, pulled the first bar out and repositioned it above the second, and kept walking right up the window like that until the whole length of lumber came away. Easy-peasy.

I'm always a little amazed at how a house is pieced together like a puzzle you can take apart. Figure out how to get new pieces and maintenance is fairly simple.

I'm also amazed when B lets me do stuff like this. She was standing just an arm's length away as I worked. Every time I start a project that involves levering pieces of lumber off the house I half-expect her to place her mortal body between me and the house, stand arms akimbo and demand to know what the hell I was thinking of doing. Somehow, I've got her buffaloed into believing I know how to make these repairs, when the fact my method is to pull things off, take a good look at the parts and try to cipher out how I could fix up new parts that would fit together in more or less the same way. It seems likely that, one of these days, I'll pull off a part I can't replace, but it hasn't happened yet. Knock wood.