A Project For This Old House

For a long time, we have had no windowsills in the front room. I wanted to make some out of vertical grain fir ( I love that wood), but I couldn't afford the wood. I also wanted to make the window casing from the same wood. I finally hit on the idea to make some windowsills out of an old piece of water damaged glue laminated beam. I found some old pieces of vertical grain fir that I salvaged from our apartments to use for the casing. So, without having to go to the store to buy any wood, I was set to start.

 I figured that this old piece would work fine. I first had to cut it in half widthwise.

 Then cut both pieces to a little wider than the finished windowsill.

 The next step was to cut each piece in half again lengthwise. This would give me four pieces for sills.

 Since my table saw could only cut part way through the beams, I had to cut the middle out with a sawzall....

 ....and pry the two pieces apart, because the sawzall doesn't cut too neatly.

 This left me with four rough blocks of glue lam big enough to carve each windowsill from.

 The planer smoothed out the rough cuts and cut off the water damaged layers of wood.

 Each piece had to be cut to the exact depth of the finished windowsill.

 Cutting and shaping the wood to match the shape of the windows came next with some complicated saw cuts and a few dado cuts.

 This was the final rough shape of the sill right before routing the edges and sanding.

 Here is a view of part of one of the completed sills. This little corner of the house is already a place where the grandkids like to sit and watch the sunset.

 Here is a detail of the lower corner.

,,,,,And an upper corner

 Did I mention that I love the natural color and grain of vertical grain fir?

Voila! The completed project. Well, sort of. There are still some nail holes to putty and some final finish and polishing to be done. After years of unfinished windows it is nice to have some done. And now, this old house just got a little nicer.