Interior Storm Windows
For the last 25 years my wife and I have been restoring an historic home in Sherman. Our projects have run the entire spectrum of renovation from basement to attic over this time and we have performed the majority of this work with our own hands. We have, by necessity and interest, become on-the-job experts on a variety of construction topics. One of these areas has been bringing some semblance of energy efficiency to a structure originally built in 1843. Over time we modernized our home's envelope with plywood sheathing, house-wrap and new cedar siding. We filled marginally insulated exterior walls with fiberglass insulation and hunted down remaining gaps and cracks from the sill beams to the soffits and filled them with spray foam. However, when it came to the original, single-pane, historic wood window sashes we struggled to find a solution. We saw these original windows with their wavy glass and delicate scale as essential to maintaining the character of the structure. We put great effort into restoring them one-by-one only to find that they remained drafty and extraordinarily inefficient. Condensation and ice that would accumulate on the inside of the windows on cold days would serve as both an indicator of this inefficiency as well as a major destructive force to the sashes themselves rapidly undoing our restoration work. Traditional storm windows placed on the exterior only seemed to help marginally with efficiency while trapping harmful moisture in the area between the sashes and the storm window. The traditional exterior storm window, in our opinion, also detracted from the aesthetic of the house's appearance overall.