The day had finally come for us to get rid of that huge window that we planned on doing from the beginning and we were pumped to get started!! We started the day off setting up the scaffolding outside, looks a little sketchy over those propane tanks doesn’t it! Then we removed the storm windows outside.
As I mentioned before we (and I mean Mace) weren’t planning to have to put the slider together ourselves but since we didn’t have a choice he tackled it head on and luckily it wasn’t as complicated as he thought but everything still needed to be perfectly square so the doors would move smoothly.
Then it was time to start swinging hammers gently removing glass! Our friend Kyle K helped Mace with the window frame demo.
After a little while they came up with a pretty good process to remove the glass panels without having glass shatter all over the place (score the caulk bead, cardboard on both sides, tap it out with a hammer).
And about 3 hours later we had a HUGE hole in the side of our house instead of a window!! Talk about letting the fresh air in!
Next we had to remove the bottom of the window frame and take it to the floor for the new door sill. First we had to remove the siding from outside.
And then we could start swinging hammers and powering up saw-zaw’s!! This part went faster but the whole process still took a couple hours.
Back in the planning stage we mentioned the rough opening was going to be about an inch smaller than what was needed for the slider. It would have been a big expense to replace the entire beam to make it an inch longer so Mace found this little gem which is specifically designed to distribute heavy loads from a beam (similar to a stud) and would allow us to remove one of the two vertical 2X4 studs (which would give us the inch larger we needed). I won’t get too technical but Mace did his research and consulted other resources and was comfortable with this solution for our single story ranch (if this were a 2 story house we might not have done it).
And here’s the stud before we removed it and after its removed with the installed hanger.
Last thing to do before calling it a day (besides clean-up) was to secure the hole from the elements!!
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