We Made 5 DIY Windows from 2x4s and Saved $1,500

Hey guys, it's Lindy. And it's Mike here, and we are T.I.Y. The Tiny It Yourself Channel, and today we're going to show you how we fabricated our own windows for our panoramic loft. They were made with wooden frames, and we had the actual glass part fabricated for us. Yes, and we actually just did these frames out of 2x4s you can get at your store. We'll show you how to pick out the best possible ones so you don't spend a bunch of money on super high-end wood. Hopefully, we've never built our own windows before, and it's kind of a rare thing to find and do yourself, so yeah, we just want to put that out there. Yeah, and we essentially just did this because it would have been super expensive, probably like $2,000 for us to do this very custom window situation where we have that angle for our butterfly roof that we wanted to match up. So we don't know how these are going to perform over a long period of time, but we saved a ton of money doing this and had some fun and learned a lot. So hopefully you'll learn something too. Let's get started. Okay, let's go shopping! Here we are at our local big box store sifting through the select studs, which are about $3 each. Here are the boards we grabbed, which have tiny knots and tight grain, which will make them easy to work with. By contrast, these are not select studs, and as you can see, they have massive knots and wide grain. Okay, so here is a side section of the stud with the crazy shape that is our window frame inside of it, and to match the windows that we have on the house, we want them to be three inches wide, and because a 2x4 is actually only three and a half inches wide, that means we can just cut half of an inch off here to match that, and of course they're only one and a half inches tall, that's worth noting. And then we're going to do a few cuts, just a cut like that and a cut like that to get this section out, and then we are going to run multiple passes through the table saw to get this groove out, and then I'm just going to do a couple passes with the router here and there, and then that's it. I also want to mention that there are really small slots that we're going to cut out here, which is going to be for caulking to get a seal, and then this just represents the screw that will then be hidden by a little piece of dowel here, and the end result is going to look something, you know, kind of like that little piece right there. So before we do this initial half inch cut off one side, I want to mention that this is an opportunity to clean up your piece of wood, actually this one is really almost perfect, it has virtually no knots, pretty tight rings, but there is a chunk out of it right here, so I can just take a half of an inch off and get rid of that entirely. So we're doing this in a way that you could technically do the whole window on the table saw, the router is just going to be to make some nicer edges, and I just want to mention when you're using the table saw, obviously follow all of the safety precautions, eye protection, ear protection, it's always good to have something to push through with so you don't get close to the blade, and just basic rules like that, and definitely go watch a video on that if you're not familiar with it. Alright, let's go. So there's one with a half inch taken off, and I need to do six of these total with all of the cuts and routing, so I'm going to go ahead and do five more of these right now. So now we've got six of these nice three inch wide pieces, and I was able to remove a lot of nasty knots and stuff, as you can see here. Okay, so back to the drawing, we've managed to remove that chunk, and now we are going to cut out a rectangle here that is going to be about one and a half inches by three quarters of an inch, and this is yet another opportunity to remove knots and imperfections, there is some nasty stuff going on here, that thing will just be completely cut out. Now we've got a ruler and stuff here that we can determine the cutting width by, on this one it's to the inside of the blade, but I need to cut to the outside of the blade to make sure I'm removing three quarters of an inch, so make sure your saw is off when you do this, and so to the very outside of that blade I'm getting exactly three quarters of an inch, so I'm ready to cut. So you can really see what's going on here, so I want this blade to go up one and a half inches, and then I want to keep a full three quarters of an inch on this side. Then we're going to make sure that our blade height is exactly one and a half inches at the peak, and so I'm a little bit higher from cutting those last ones, and actually right about there is perfect. Now we're ready to cut. Okay, so now you should have four boards that look approximately like this. We have a slightly offset cut here, and now we're going to come in and just meet that incision and get rid of this chunk right here. To accomplish that we're just going to do the inverse of what we did before, so instead of a one and a half inch high blade and a three quarter inch gap, we're going to do a three quarter inch high blade and a one and a half inch gap. So three quarters inch high at the very top, like that, one and a half inches to the outside because we're going to eat away one and a half inches, we don't want to go past that. Now it's key to make sure you're coming in the right way. We don't want to chop off this section, we want to chop off the shorter section, and so we don't want to do an incision on that side, we want to do an incision on that side. So it'll go down like that. Now you can see we've got that nice bit of wood taken out there, we're ready for the next step. Alright, this is now the current state of the six boards, we've got that nice chunk taken out and we're ready to do the glazing channel. So the glass is going to come in right about like that. The glass itself is three quarters of an inch thick, it's two eighths inch panes with a half of an inch gap in the middle, and then we are going to do three eighths of an inch on either side for support. So for more detail, this is what we're going to do, so we're going to start by cutting this channel out step by step. So for this next step, if you have a three quarter inch wide router, that would just be super easy, but I want to show how to do it on the table saw for those that don't have that router set up. And so we're just going to do slice, slice, slice, slice, slice, I believe it's going to be about six slices or so. And so I just want to mention it's certainly going to be a better strategy to go in like this with this wall right up against it than it would be to come in with this one and have that gap and that overhang and then space all the way out here. So we're going to go this way. So we want to have three eighths of an inch of wood and then that gap for the glass, so we want to make sure that we have a solid three eighths of an inch space here to the inside of the blade over here. And that looks good right there. We need to get the height right, which is going to be five eighths of an inch, it's close to there from the last cut, and go down a little bit, and that looks about perfect right there. Okay, so now I've got kind of a weird F going on, we've got that three eighths inch wide piece here, and this goes down five eighths of an inch. And now to be safe, I'm actually going to come over to the end over here about three quarters over for this gap, because if I just kept going slice, slice, slice, slice, slice, it would be easy to lose count. So I'm going to slice here and then work backwards. And then we'll stay five eighths inch deep, but then this one will come out to one and an eighth inch, so it will be eating up to one and an eighth inch out. Okay, so now your board should look a little bit something like this. And I'm just going to slice by slice, cut this out, and then really make sure I have a full three quarters of an inch for that glass here. Now your result might start looking something a little bit like this with these flaps, but those are super easy to chisel out at the end, so don't worry about those. Here we are most of the way. At six passes total, this is what we look like, and these really easily come off. Your glass is probably better, but this thing happens to be three quarter inch ply, and it fits in there, which is good. Here's the result after a little bit of chiseling. So we basically made an F. The next step is to route the outer edge of the glass so that it can wick moisture away and not get caught on the sill and rot out. And we'll be doing that just with a sort of wedge router bit, a chamfered bit, about a quarter of an inch out. So I've just got my piece clamped here so I can just run the router along this edge. And you may have noticed that the ends weren't done. I can't really route the ends, and so what I'm doing is clamping down each piece and then meeting them so that I can just route right over that and get two ends at once. Here's the current situation right here, and I'm going to fancify this edge with this router bit right here like that. So let's give it a try. All right, so if you look close, you can see that I clamped down two boards at once so I could get both of them in one router session and not having to turn the router off and on and clamp again. And one little thing, I noticed I had to reverse a little bit to smooth out the wood, which is probably not the best router etiquette, but it got the best, smoothest result. All right, so I have all my pieces here, and the next step is to just clean them up a little bit, especially on the inside where they're going to be seen. I have some sort of saw marks that I want to get rid of and just some dust that I don't want there because the next step is to paint them. Perfect example, I got a little saw blade mark there for when I had a slight shift in angle. And then, you know, this could probably be cleaned up a little bit. You know, there's a little bit of fuzziness here that I can take a fine sander and get rid of. Looking much better now. Okay, so I've laid out all my boards upside down, and I'm going to paint the first two sides and then flip and paint the other sides. I'm going to paint it with this paint and primer in one. It's a white satin by Pittsburgh. It's pretty serious, and it's mold resistant and stuff like that. Not super natural or non-toxic. So we're probably going to end up painting over the inside of this with some low VOC stuff. And I also just have a polyester brush to do that with. I was expecting this to be super toxic, but I'm pretty amazed. This really smells like nothing. It says less than 50 grams per liter of VOCs. Okay, so the backside is dried, and I flipped it over, and you can see that you have a choice. So this is where the glass is. So this is the exterior, and this is the interior. And you can decide to not paint this interior part and just stain it, but since we're going to have a white windowsill, I'm just going to go ahead and paint this entire thing. And I'm also not worrying about painting the ends here, because the whole thing is going to be mitered. It's going to be cut here anyway like that. So this won't exist. All right, now I'm ready to do a second coat, and my strategy here is to really lay it on and make sure we have a super solid situation on this external surface, but to not gunk up this channel too much. So make sure it's fully covered, but if we get chunks and stuff in there or raised points, then the window might end up bigger than we want it to be. All right, here is where we are at right now. Everything is essentially painted. Okay, here is one of our three glass inserts that we had made by a factory through a local company. This is double-pane, vacuum-sealed, low-e coated, all that jazz. And you can actually see this side is higher than that side, and that's because it will be one of the three windows that we are doing here, ding ding ding, and then we have the other two there and there, and one of these is going to be an awning window, which means it will open. The rest are just going to be fixed. Okay, so there's about a thousand ways to do the corner joints on the wooden frame, but I'm going to go with a simple mitered cut, just doing a 45 degree angle if you have a square window. But since I have some kind of weird angled windows, I'm going to have to do some weird angles, and most people don't need to worry about this, but I actually need to cut a greater than 45 degree angle, which these can't do, and I'm going to show you a kind of sketchy workaround to do that. So for our crazy windows, we needed to make a 47 and a half degree cut here. Again, this is probably not relevant for everybody, but in order to do that on a saw that only goes to 45 degrees, I essentially just measured how much distance there is between each degree and calculated the equivalent of two and a half degrees with a piece here that then concentrically sort of lands right there, and that way that's equivalent to another two and a half degrees out, and so I could cut a piece like this, and that will be the exact angle I want, and definitely best practice to clamp this stuff in when it's sort of floating like that. So that'll get you a good safe cut. I definitely suggest experimenting with some dummy pieces like this before cutting your final painted pieces. I also just really quickly need to make sure these windows actually fit, so official test time. So I had to go back to the shop, to the table saw, and take out a tiny sliver out of the channel to widen it, and then I painted it again, and so give yourself some wiggle room for the paint. Moment of truth, bam, pretty good, look at that right there. Okay, so right now here is my setup for a normal 45 degree cut. I've got it clamped down, I've got it set at 45 degrees, and it's ready to chop. Alright, there's the result, and in case you're wondering why this looks a little fatter, the person on the table saw before me had it set at 5 degrees for that cut. Okay, now I have reversed the angle for the second cut, 45 degrees the other way, just like a picture frame. Alright, so here is the first cut piece, and a great representative of how the window looks from the side. Okay, so I've got the bottom one made, now I need to make the top one. I'm not going to spend too much time showing how to do these cuts, because most people are just going to do a 45, but I got a 42.75 degree cut there, and a 47.25 degree cut there, so wish me luck. I only have enough extra pieces for one mistake. Alright it's starting to get dark, so I'm just going to keep going with these cuts and hope that they all fit together, because if they don't, I'm going to cry. It's got a little scrape from being clamped into the chop saw, so I'll have to give it another bit of paint, but it looks like, with a little bit of pressure, which it's going to have, it fits just about perfectly. Okay, so I've got all my pieces cut, and it's sort of about to rain, so hopefully I can get this going. And I'm just going to be screwing in the corners. There's guaranteed a better way to do this, a more craftsmanly way to do this, but I think I'm going to go probably two on one side, and one on the other, maybe I can fit another on the other side. I'm going to come in about a quarter of an inch, really sure to not get that glass, and I'm definitely going to pre-drill this, so I'm not going to split anything at all, so let's go for it. I'm just going to squeeze these guys together, come in right about there, match the angle. I'm actually going to pop a screw in right now, so I don't risk creating any drift, any difference between the screw holes. Looks good to me. All right, now I'm going to do one from this angle, final one here. That's thunder. And the two screws, and I'm really not trying to over-tighten these at all, just so that they're flush. By the way, I'm using a 7-64th inch drill bit, so it's slightly smaller than these eighth inch screws. So I'm just going to keep going with this configuration on all four corners. Okay, so this is the current state of the window. The next step is to caulk these edges up and make sure that they are perfectly sealed, and then I'm going to go ahead and paint it again, get a nice third coat on this, and you know, cover up all the scruff marks like this. And here is a look on the inside. I think it turned out pretty good. And I will say, you're probably bound to get situations like this where it's slightly off and I'm just going to solve that with a little bit of caulk and then painting it over. There's one more thing I want to mention that's sort of an optional thing that I want to experiment with here, and that is on a lot of wooden windows, the bottom part is what will rot out, and so I've noticed a lot of wooden window companies will do some metal flashing over this bottom bar, and I happen to have a lot of extra aluminum flashing, so I'm just going to quickly experiment and see if I can get a nice sort of bottom strip of flashing here that tucks in there and bends over this, and probably would be tacked in here on the bottom, and just see if it works out. Okay, so what I just did was I cut this piece of flashing that was about the width of this bottom piece here, and I just started bending it at a half of an inch on sort of a harder edge like this right here, so even just with my fingers, just going like that, and then just got to the point where I can start bending it back like this, just keep working it over, and hopefully that will slide in, and we'll see how well this fits, but I also made a sort of notch out there so that the metal could sort of follow this crease and then bring water down so water didn't make it into that crack as easily, so let me just see if this thing fits in. Alright, so it does fit, I guess the next step would be to create a crease about a quarter of an inch down so it matches that, and then a bend right here. Also just sort of use an object to form around this edge as well, start with a basic bend, accent the edge, sort of, so now at least you have guidelines that you can then use to bend along a maybe sharper surface and get a more precise line. So this is the final result here, when I do some light sanding and paint it over in white, these sort of imperfections should be less obvious. Okay, so I'm going to go ahead and tack these on, but I don't have any nails that are short enough, these will definitely go to the glass, so I'm just going to clip these nails down and go for it. And here's my mini nail. Okay, so I ended up doing five nails on the bottom, and that's the result, I'm going to go ahead and do a light sanding, and hopefully it can be caulked easily and painted easily, we'll see. Okay, so I'm going to go ahead and use this 40 year caulking, which is also for windows. It's white, you could go clear, and I'm going to paint it anyway, so, and I'm probably going to come back and go over this to even out the edge, but I'm just getting some volume on there right now. This caulk's a little cold, so it's acting funky. There are a lot of tools out there for shaping these caulk lines, I just sort of made one out of this piece of cork. Alright, so this is sort of the end result for a corner, it's not perfect, but it definitely worked. I also made sure to caulk in that sort of gap right there, there's a tiny little gap there, and yeah, I sort of just used a razor blade to clean this up, or a piece of aluminum also worked. Okay, so the outside is done, I'm going to let this caulk dry, and then I'm going to do the inside. Okay, so I haven't cleaned it up that much yet, but for the inside I went for just a much subtler, smaller bead of caulk with a much less intense angle, just as like a sort of insurance policy. Alright, the caulking said ready to paint in 30 minutes, so here we go. Aluminum might take a couple coats on its own though. Alright, so that first coat is on, and as I suspected, the aluminum looks a lot less flawed with that paint on. You can still see a really minor dent or two, which I can maybe even fix later, but I'm happy with it, especially because the window will probably last maybe, who knows, an extra 10 years. Who knows? We'll see in 10 years. Okay, so we have the three irregular shaped windows done here, as you can see they all go in a row, and so we're ready to install these. The next step is to just pre-drill the screw holes to attach them to the frame. Now what we're going to do is pre-drill on all four sides of our window so that we can anchor it to our framing. And we're just going to go ahead and do two screws per frame piece, sort of toward the edge. Now with those holes, we're just going to take some of our screws and pre-set them so that it's easier when the window is actually above us to just drill those in. If you have a wood frame, I would suggest using longer screws than the ones we're using. Alright so as you can see, now we have all eight screws in. Right now Mikey is removing our excess house wrap. If you haven't seen our how to put in windows video, I suggest checking that out to see how we cut the house wrap to fit our windows into our framing. Alright so the window opening is prepped and ready for a window. We are not sure exactly how tight this is going to fit yet. We didn't leave very much tolerance. We might do the silk sealer, that white foam stuff that we used in our window video. We might not be able to, but we'll see. So Lindy's going to pass me the window and hopefully it fits. So the next step right now is to make it pop out the same amount as our other windows, which is a little over an inch. And so I gotta just match that up, and that way it'll match the other windows. Alright, corner number one is in position. Okay so it's dark now, but we got that window in and I'm just going to keep going and see how far we can get tonight, and I'll show you the progress tomorrow. Okay so it got a little too dark to film, but we put all three windows in anyway. As you can see, we popped our screws in and did some blocking, which still needs to be adjusted a little bit. But I went ahead and finished the flashing tape on the outside, so let's go take a look at that. Since there is no nailing flange on this window and our cedar trim is going to cover the sides, we just curled the flashing tape up against the sides of the windows. To keep the water from running down the sides, we also folded the top piece down. So here they are, and the next step is to caulk in between the windows with just a vertical bead of caulk. I need to document this because this is the most frustrating thing that's ever happened. I shoved a nail down through here to keep it from drying out, and I tried to pull the head, and the nail broke. Am I that strong, or is this nail just the crappiest nail in the world? Oh my god. Thankfully it seems to be coming out with this little tip cutter thing here. Let's see if I can do this and film at the same time. Grrr. I'm pulling teeth. Filming and caulking at the same time was not working out, but there you go. There's the end result. Pretty smooth. Looks like one window. Sort of. Much better. Hopefully no water will get through there. I'll probably have to redo this in a few years, we'll see. And the fourth window is just a simple square window, so super easy to put in. Okay, so the fifth and final window that I am making is going to be a casement window. It is operable, and it is so complicated and annoying to make, and it's going to be so different for everybody since I'm using reclaimed window materials, that I'm just going to really quickly show you what I'm doing instead of do a kind of how-to on it. So right now I have the outer frame in my hand, and I'm putting on the gasket, which will seal the window so it's watertight. And the inner frame I already made, and it is basically a thinner version of the other frames, but it has a lip on the edge, and that lip is going to line up with the gasket and create a seal, hopefully. So this is actually a pretty large window, so it's hard to see what's going on, and it's sideways, but this inner frame is going to open up out from the outer frame, and I'm going to use some, you know, hardware like this piece from an old casement window, this crank, which is going to be on the inside and help push it out, and then I have to attach some things like this track to the inner window, and the hardest part is figuring out how to get the hinge going, and I might just end up doing some sort of standard exterior door hinges, like I've seen some other people do on their custom windows, but ideally it would be some type of internal hinge, we'll see what happens. And just to give you a better idea of the concept of the window, this is the outside, this is the inside, and then this is the gasket, which I'm going to put a little strip of wood over and glue on, which is why I haven't painted it yet, and then we've got this guy again, which will pop on like that, and then that will create a seal as it closes. Okay, I want to do a quick update on this casement window, the operable window, it's about 80 or 90% done now, and I've gone ahead and I've added a little handle to help open it and close it, and then I added a little latch there because that corner seemed to be the one that needed the extra closing, and this is the current state of the crank right now, it totally works, I can do a quick demonstration in a second, and I've also built this little box to put over it, I'm currently gluing it so I have it clamped right now, but it just sort of slides over, and it's going to be painted white, and then this little piece goes on that side right there, so it's blocked as well, and yeah, it's basically ready to put in. Here's the front of it, it does need another coat of paint, but you can get an idea, a couple design things we did was do a little overhang on the top so that the water couldn't get in there, and then I had it sort of sit proud out a little bit here as well so that water wouldn't get into the bottom crack, and then we used these exterior hinges, and I do have a little rubber strip on the inside of those between them, so that water hopefully doesn't get in. I put this little box on here to cover up the hardware, and it still needs a little bit of polishing as a window, but you can get the idea, and you can finally see this massive panorama that we originally designed, which is going to be epic, if we can ever pull this thing up to like the Grand Canyon or something, it's going to be sweet. Okay, so just for a preview of our future materials, and so you can see what it looks like here are the windows currently, it's almost completely done but not, and so they're doing great. Alright guys, thanks for watching our ridiculously long video about windows. Yeah, it was basically a small window making documentary, so if you watched until now, great job. Next we are on to the siding, so stay tuned for that video. And check us out on Instagram if you haven't already, tinyityourself, just like the channel. Alright. Thanks for watching. Bye.