Into the Groove

In my continuing efforts to class this place up, I spent yesterday afternoon rescreening four of my windows. The day that I moved into this house, Mother of Ken had a fit about how dirty the window screens on the living room windows were and she ripped them off and threw them in the bathtub to try to clean them. Unfortunately, twelve years of the Disgustingtons doesn't come off that easily.

So, four years later, I decided that replacing the window screens was my only option and that it couldn't be that difficult. I also had holes in the bathroom window screen and in one of the bedroom window screens.

Here's my set up with one of the living room screens--screening, splining, splining tool, utility knife, screw driver, and the home repair book that Father of Ken gave me so that I would stop calling him every time I needed to replace a shower head:

Kenna "helping:"

So, after you remove the old splining and screen from the frame, you cut a new piece of screen the same size as the outside of the frame:


The next step is to roll the splining into the groove on the frame. Here, I had to use two pieces of splining side by side because the grooves were wider than my splining and Home Depot is 20 minutes away.




Cut off the excess splining with a utility knife:



Trim excess screen with the utility knife (carefully, people--I learned this from bitter experience) and then you have a finished rescreened window:



The screens for the bathroom window and one of the guest room windows are finished and ready to be replaced:



New screen in place in the bathroom:

New screen in the bedroom:

New screen in the living room--see how clean it is now?

While I had everything taken apart, I decided to experiment with the curtains on the picture window. So, what do you think? I usually just use the valances, but I am trying the longer panels to see how I like them. Thoughts? Obviously, if I go with this, I will tie the longer panels back. I thought that the longer panels might help keep things warmer this winter and then I could go back to the valances alone for warmer weather.