Yesterday we posted about our recent success while working on the exterior base wall of the main house. Today we planned to plug a few holes where some of the bird housing used to be…and since we’d have plenty of mortar left over from those places, Stefan planned to knock out the glass windows in the horse stables which we’ll be bricking up so he could do everything at once.
We went to Hagebau this morning to order all our drywall supplies for delivery next Tuesday (yes, things really are moving along quickly now) and pick up the building bricks for the wall. When we got home Stefan taped off the the smaller of the two windows and began trying to break it out.
That’s when we noticed that these windows were made from safety glass…over 1 inch thick, 3 layers of glass (about 3/4 inch piece sandwiched between two 1/2 inch pieces). Here’s a cross section photo I took of one of the last pieces of glass still in the wall. It’s hard to see what’s what but you can see how thick it is and perhaps even identify the 3 layers.
What we thought would be a fairly simple project turned into a 3 hour struggle of strength and ability to dodge flying glass. When Stefan started working from the outside of the horse stable, smashing the glass into the room, I realized we really needed to clear at least some of the things out of the horse stalls already (something we weren’t really planning to do until Monday). Thankfully we didn’t need to move the tile flooring yet since it weighs a ton and we probably wouldn’t have had the strength to finish removing the window if we’d done that too.
It took 30 minutes to break the first hole in the sheet of glass. Then we realized we’d basically need to break the glass down into pieces and more or less pry the glass from the frame.
Another 30 minutes later and we’d gotten from one hole to about half the window being out. At least our technique was working. I have no idea why they had safety glass in these walls but perhaps it was because they once had horses in here. I am quite certain that there is no horse on earth that would have knocked out any of these windows.
We didn’t take too many photos during the process because I was actually working on painting the house while Stefan was beating up the windows. But in the end it took about 3 hours to get the windows out, along with a portion of wall since they’d bricked the bottom of this window in by about 8 inches. Talk about a nightmare.
Here’s some of the mess we made already. We were actually thinking we wouldn’t be needing a trash container until Tuesday or Wednesday…but apparently we weren’t really thinking clearly there. Until one can arrive (which will likely be Tuesday now anyway since they have never gotten us a container on the same day we ordered it), we’ll just have to make a few piles and work around the mess.
So tomorrow we’ll work on doing more painting around here and hopefully can close up these holes too. At least this give the room some more time to really air out since it still smells very strongly of birds which once lived in part of this room.
