I really, really like windows. They give a view to the world. They can be used for ventilation. Those are good things.
To bring those of you who are just joining my daily blog up to date, I’ve spent this week building a garage – in Happy Valley, Tennessee. My thanks for the opportunity to get back into the building mode courtesy of my oldest step-son’s father-in-law. Back to my saga of building in 100 degree heat and nearly 100% humidity….
Steve wanted to make certain there was plenty of natural light into his building. So it has six windows. Considering one wall has two 12 foot wide by 9 foot tall doors, it gives an idea of what was going to happen on the other walls.
From a building standpoint – windows are a pain. I will repeat, windows are a pain. Every window on this building took the cutting of two panels of wall steel to fit around it. The cutting was not so much of an issue. For me it was a case of measure about 100 times, before cutting. Every one of the window cutouts worked just perfect, no botched jobs.
The real challenge, is sliding the panels into place around the windows.
For this building, windows with built in J channels were ordered, which I always recommend. There is little more time consuming, or more prone to a future leak, than having to cut steel J channels to fit around windows.
The less than fun part is having to slide the panels into the J channel at the top of the walls, and above and below the windows. And then getting the overlap of one panel to slide over the underlap of the previously installed panel.
In the past, I’ve used a putty knife placed between the panels to allow the new panel to slide up over the prior panel. In this case, we found a new trick….we had to cut small strips off a few of the soffit panels, so we took the cutoff vinyl strips and used them as sliding skids. Worked out neat and was less trouble than the putty knife method.
Come back tomorrow and I’ll finish up on my construction week for Steve’s new garage. After a week of sweating in the hot mid-July sun of Tennesee, I’ll be looking forward to getting back to my air conditioned office!
