Dry-In Complete: windows and doors

 

Date: September 8 - September 26, 2025

I discussed the logistics of window delivery and how two items were delayed in my post on the roof sheathing.  The new windows that were on site in early September were installed by Austin and crew on Monday the 8th at the same time that the gutters were being finished. We had a full house!

 

The new paradigm: one guy works while the other guy watches his phone. 

I had purchased four rolls of the Zip System flashing tape - good stuff but pricey at $30/roll -  which you can see has been applied around the window flange. The window install is quite simple since you can just set the window into the rough opening and nail the flange to the wall sheathing then tape it. 

 

 

The larger upstairs window in the center of the picture below was not a new window. It's a sash for the casement windows in the house that was part of a bungled repair job that resulted in the window company giving me the unusable sash for free (a $900 value!). I've been holding on to it for years and now I've got a place to put it to use:

 

Same window from the inside: 

 

Austin said that window was installed which was over-and-above the work they had agreed to do. However it was done in a completely unacceptable way and was basically just a cork in the hole when he declared it finished.

 

When it came to the door installs, the crew really showed their lack of experience. In short, they tried to install the doors like they did the windows: put them in the hole and nail the weather flange around the outside, tape it and declare it done. The "loading dock" doors below were only nailed through the brick molding - no shims. Readers who are familiar with door hanging know that you have to shim the door jam into the rough opening so each door hangs square and the hinges are securely attached to the building frame. This was historically done with "door nails" and the saying "Dead as a door nail" expresses the firmness of the way the nail is driven.

 

 

The crew stayed until 6:30 or 7PM wrapping things up in a hurry. I think they got the word from the boss that this job was taking way too much time. The stair stringers were supposed to be done and the 11-step upper section was, but they had screwed up the cut on the 3-step lower section and now there was no appropriate lumber they could use. "I'll take care of it" I said, since it looked like they were not clear on what the appropriate rise and run needed to be. 

 

As they packed their truck I asked them for the remaining flashing tape and I was pointed to a single half roll on the floor. Those rolls of tape have 90' each and I was having a hard time seeing how they had used more than 300' of tape that day.  When I cleaned up I found just one empty roll so I guess a couple of rolls just up and walked away by themselves. Not a huge deal but I knew I was going to need more tape for the remaining work. My mistake for not doling out the tape on an as-needed basis.

 

So Austin pulled out, taking all his tools with him, but made clear that Stacy (his dad) thought that I owed him for the work above-and-beyond what he had intended when he gave me a price for "dry-in" labor only.

 

When we spoke on the phone Stacy said I owed him extra for the finish work done on the eaves and gables as well as the cost of screws, nails and other materials he had provided. He maintained that the tongue and groove in eaves was part of siding activities and pointed out that our agreement had excluded siding.  I had considered it part of the roof decking, not siding, because it wasn't on the side of the building, and the way I designed it, you couldn't install the roof until those tongue and groove and fascia boards were installed.  It was "common knowledge" that fascia work was part of the siding job he said. He figured the siding job would cost $10,000 and he that work was about a third of the job so I owed him $3,000.  The idea that what they had done was a third of the siding job was ludicrous - my siding using rough-sawn hemlock boards is going to take a lot more work than that! However they had spent most of a month on the job and the $17,000 they had bid for labor was low for that amount of effort, so I agreed to fork it over.

 

Finishing up the stairs turned out to be a pretty fun carpentry project. I was able to salvage one of the boards they had miss-cut - the pencil marks are what is correct:

Then I used some of the two-by pine that we had milled a couple years back to make temporary treads for the staircase. You'll notice each tread is notched so it sits a bit lower - reflecting the height that I'm planning for the final red-oak stairs I'll build.

 

In my conversations with Stacy about the bill we had discussed the tasks remaining and he said he'd swing by to assess. When he did I went over the things that had been half-done in the big hurry to finish.  He said he would come out and personally take care of those odds and ends when the remaining doors got there and when I had the stairwell ready.  Asheville Window and Door made the final delivery the next week and Stacy came out with the same band of helpers to get through the punch list.  He definitely knew how to hang a door correctly so we got a functional entrance door.

The big event of the day was getting the 370 pound cast-iron bathtub upstairs. The plumber was there along with Stacy and three helpers and me - six of us wrangling that thing up the stairs which were noticeably flexing with each "1-2-3 heft!". It got there and that mitigated a lot of the aggravation I had been feeling about that crew.

The weekend after I got around to installing the hardware on the beautiful french doors upstairs which will open onto a deck (eventually).  Their flaky approach worked marginally OK for the tan fiberglass loading dock doors you see above, but it was a disaster for the more sophisticated Marvin doors.

Austin told me the door was in but hardware still needed to be installed. "No problem - I'll do it" I replied. However when I started to work I found the doors were stuck shut. So I cut nails, shimmed and shammed and shimmed some more, got the doors to open, adjusted hinges and so on for a few hours. It just wouldn't adjust to the point where both doors swung freely and met in the middle correctly. I poured over the Marvin install instructions looking for clue but didn't find much to help me.

Eventuality I realized that because Austin & Co. had nailed the weather flange into the wall sheathing, my shims were basically trying to warp the jam and it was not cooperating. What was required was to erect the 28' ladder outside, climb up and tear off all the (expensive 😒) tape, then pull all the nails with a pry bar to get the whole frame back to the starting state. Now I found the shimming to be effective, and along with the adjustment of the hinges I got the doors to work correctly. Then it was back out to the ladder to re-nail the flange, repair the Tyvek and re-tape the whole thing. Not easily done as a one-man job - it was a full day's work.

 

Even after all that, I afraid I can't claim that the topic of this post, "Windows and Doors" is finished. You'll notice in the pictures there are two gaping holes on either end of the shop. The plan for those is to have dutch doors in the middle of the wall which can be opened when working with long boards in the shop. I'm putting off making those doors until I have my shop operational, so the interim plan is to put some plywood in there. However I'll need to do work on the opening so that the siding can be installed cleanly. I'll cover that part of this topic in the post on Siding.