Glazier's putty and masking tape

If you haven't read "Gather 'Round All You Home Renovators" from Anne's Almost Quintessence, please do so now. It was one of the first posts I ever read by her, and since at that time I was already planning to buy and renovate (well, "restore", really) my grandmother's old house, I paid special attention to it. Plus it's damned funny. And completely true.

Today I put the finishing touches on the last of my required tasks - I think. The grapevine wall is repaired, the cracked pavement in the grapevine sidewalk has been smoothed over and filled in, and the garage is completely painted. The last bit I had to do was paint the recesses of the windows and the window frames themselves. The recesses are white and the frames are dark green, so this required a bit of masking tape. I didn't mask the frames when I did the recesses, because I figured that any white could easily be painted over with green, but I did mask the panes of glass themselves - it would be easy enough to scrape any drips or splashes off of the glass, but I decided to avoid the issue entirely. After the white was completely dry, I masked that off and painted the frames green. After that was dry, I began to remove the masking tape...

...and discovered that much of the putty around the window glass had begun to crumble and fall off, and at this point the masking tape was pretty much the only thing holding the windows in the frames.

OK. New problem, new skill to learn. Tomorrow I will buy glazier's putty and use one of my putty knives for its intended purpose. Yay team me. And I hope none of the windows decides to tumble out of its frame and shatter on my head. Maybe I'd better wear goggles.

(Oh dear. I found this on Anne's site, too...but she was trying to do this in the cold of early December...)

In other news, I planted my two cherry trees and two grapevines today, leaving only the six blueberries to be planted. My eightysomething neighbor is looking forward to tasting the grapes and cherries! Given his stamina, I wouldn't be surprised if he's around a few years down the road when these things actually begin to bear fruit.