All summer I had been meaning to work on painting the trim of our house. This meant replacing some rotting wood around our front window. However, with the preparations needed for Kaylee's arrival, summer quickly turned to fall. It turned out fall would be easier to paint when it was a little cooler out anyway. I decided to replace the casing with an indestructible PVC material.
The PVC trimboards I found were made by a company called Azek. A friend of mine had replaced the trim on his entire house with this stuff, and he had some left over - which he let me have. These trimboards come in 18 foot long sections, and this guy lived in Madison - about 50 miles from home. It took a good bit of tying down to get these boards placed on the roof-rack of my minivan so they wouldn't fly off as screamed down I-94.
The first thing I had to do was remove the old, rotten casing (or brick moulding as some call it). I also took out the lower left and lower right panes, as these were removable. I stripped and repainted these separately. The image above shows the front arch with the casing removed and the re-painted lower left and right panes.
The next trick was to figure out how to make straight boards round. The Azek boards were somewhat flexible, but not flexible enough. As it turned out the trim boards were 4 inches wide, while the casing only needed to be 2 inches wide. This meant I could cut the original arch into 6 pieces, and fit them into one strait piece. The picture to the right shows the original casing on the top (cut up) and the newly built one below it. The other peices were for the remainder of the casing.
I put the arch pieces together with a combination of dowels, and PVC cement. This created one solid piece that will never fade, warp, or rot.
Next, I had to strip the remaining wood around the windows. This part couldn't be replaced without replacing the entire window. I would've liked to have gotten new windows with all vinyl trim. However, our neighbor, who has a very similar arched window, replaced his - at a cost of about $3700.
So instead I used Sherwin-Williams 'Duration' paint, which is supposed to have a life-time warranty. We'll see how it holds up. Once the paint dried I nailed up the new, Azek casing and caulked up all of the edges. I also ended up painting the new casing to cover up all of the nail heads from the stainless steel nails I used. This picture shows the final window (notice my reflection in the window?).
Later I found on the Azek website that their material can be heated up and shaped. This might have helped with the arch, but I think mine turned out good enough.
