With the walls all painted, it was time to to finish the windows. I had the tough decision to either leave the window returns as natural wood and just seal them with tung oil (my beautiful, all-wood windows are 100% fir - thanks again to Norfolk Lumber for these gorgeous pieces!) or paint them. A large part of me thought, "How could I possibly paint over this lovely wood, and why did I then bother getting wood windows if I'm just going to paint them???" But then I recalled that the main reason I got wood windows was for the environmental impact and indoor air quality assurance, not necessarily for the aesthetics. The wood look is very stunning, but I'm wanting a more contemporary, modern feel. As well, all of my cabinets will be wood (stained with a water-based, VOC-free, grey stain), so that would be A LOT of wood to look at (I have 13 windows, remember?!). Lastly, if I left the wood natural, I would need fir window casings, which were 2.5 times the price of aspen casings. So, with all this reasoning, I opted for painting the window returns and getting the aspen casings. :)
I had leftover paint from the walls (Benjamin Moore's "Cloud Cover"), so I got it tinted a few shades darker at Interior Touches in Winnipeg (thank you so much!) for a bit of contrast to the walls. Because it's still winter, I wasn't able to paint the whole window returns, as I need to open the windows up and paint the edges of the awning and casement windows, so that will have to wait a few months. But the rest of it turned out great!
Next was the casings. Who's ready for another installment of "realizing your mistake just a minute too late" in the saga that is this tiny house project??? Soooo, my Dad and I remeasured each and every window to ensure the proper measurements for the casings before we started cutting. Then each measurement needed 3" added for each side of the 1.5" casing width, plus another 0.5" in order to have a 0.25" reveal on each side. Guess what I forgot to do when we started cutting??? Yup, I only added 3", not 3.5". And guess when I remembered? That's right, immediately after the last casing was cut. Bahaha, typical Melissa! So, that meant either having zero reveal or re-cutting each and every casing. I decided to just keep the zero revel on the upstairs windows (because they're super long, and I would've needed to buy a lot more new casing), and then we could use the largest casings from the main floor windows to cut down for the next largest casings, and so on. We ended up only needing a couple more pieces of casings, so it wasn't a huge additional cost (just more time - but I'm never going to complain about quality time with my Dad, especially when we're so good at laughing at our mistakes!).
We painted the casings then used brad nails to attach them to the windows. We then filled the corners with a water-based, no-VOC wood filler. Once that was dry, we sanded and repainted. Oh, and Murphy made an appearance with his darn law when I was on the FINAL window casing and ran out of brad nails (not exaggerating that it was the last window!). Luckily Stevens Lumber in Fannystelle isn't far, and I was able to get another box, though their smallest box contained 5000 nails...haha! Now I have LOTS. :D
I love it ❤ 🥂