Removing a Tilt-Out Window Sash for Dummies

Yep, the bottom has been raised...

Anyone who's ever moved into a different home – and that's pretty much everyone these days, right? – knows that the previous residents usually forget to leave the instruction manuals for everything but the kitchen appliances (and often forget those). If the new home is your first experience with those newfangled tilt-out windows, chances are you have no idea how to take out the sashes for spring cleaning. Have no fear, the internet's here to help. Just hope that you don't encounter the kind of non-help offered up in the SFGate HomeGuide titled "How to Remove a Tilt-Out Window Sash." Given that freelancer Cecilia Harsch wrote this piece for Demand Media (parent of eHow.com), you should probably know better than to trust it...

In the interests of full disclosure, one of the Antisocial Network staffers had an "accident" the first time he tried to perform this task, and the reason he had that accident is because, like Harsch, he didn't know what he was doing. He does now...

Cecilia's instructions are simple. Basically, she tells you to:

1. Unlock the window lock(s)
2. Unlock the sash release(s)
3. "Pull" the top of the window toward you until the glass is horizontal
4. Lift one side of the sash to release the window from its track, then pull the window out.

Harsch's problem? If she had actually bothered to check with a manufacturer's website or other information, she would have found that they instruct you to open the window by five or six inches before trying to tilt it. That's right, instructions from Swisco, Modernview and United Window ALL tell you to open the window first to engage the sash shoes. If you don't – as our staffer learned – you will probably damage a tension spring! Even one of the references she supposedly consulted shows a video of the homeowner opening the window first. The other one doesn't, but that manufacturer doesn't even make tilt-outs! Join us now as we all shout, "Dumbass!" at the top of our lungs. It was pretty obvious from the get-go that Cecilia (whose claimed expertise is in gardening and group exercise in her StudioD profile) knew little or nothing about windows, because of this introductory comment:

"You can tilt the window sash into the room to clean them, but completely removing the tilt-out window sash allows you to access the outside of the stationary sash without having to maneuver around the tilt-out sash."

That suggests to our home-improvement guru that Harsch was not aware (feel free to read that as "didn't learn while frantically 'researching' the assignment") that she's describing a single-hung sash window, but there is such a thing as a double-hung window. Oh, yeah: if you want to remove the upper sash in a double-hung window, you must remove the lower sash and then lower the top sash by five or six inches before you unlock the sash releases.

This "do-it-yourself HomeGuide" may have cost some ignorant homeowner a significant chunk of change to repair or, God forbid, replace, a window. But that's OK, because our latest Dumbass of the Day is a "professional writer since 2009" who was paid to post this crap. Thanks again, DMS...

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