A Small Set of Sharp Tools

This summer I’ve been trying to repair several windows of my 125 year-old house. They are double-hung, wooden windows. When I got started I thought that a few of them would need to be re-glazed, but as it turns out almost all of them need to be re-glazed. And joints repaired. And rotten wood consolidated. And glass replaced because, you know, fragile… And lots of painting.

Good tools are necessary for any endeavor like this, and so I gathered up scrapers and clamps and sandpaper and special window tools and putty knives. And what I’ve found is that among all of those tools, I need two of them the most: a claw-type paint scraper for getting the 3+ layers of paint off the exterior and a razor blade scraper. And of those two, the razor blade scraper is by far the most important.

I use the razor to remove the tenacious bits of glazing by slicing underneath it or making cuts into it, because I can do it surgically and without breaking the glass. I use it to help free old glazing points embedded in the sash like Excalibur. It works wonderfully on some of the heavily painted areas because I can get underneath all the layers instead of having to work my way down through them with the claw scraper. It’s indispensable for cleaning up the glass after I’ve taken it out of the sash or re-glazed it. Even when it’s dull it’s still useful to carefully pick at or wear away stubborn paint.

It’s great to have sophisticated tools for highly-specialized tasks, and multi-function tools certainly have their place, as well. But there’s a certain quiet, almost unremarkable wisdom in having a small set of “sharp” tools: simple, powerful tools that can be applied in flexible ways.