Before anyone asks... Big house, 7 bedrooms, located in Kenton (North West London). Exterior paint-work neglected for many years, now affecting rendered walls and most woodwork both. Interior not much better, having last been decorated some 25 years ago, albeit to a high standard when done.
I have my work cut out, as you can imagine.
One of my tasks was to repair the exterior cill to a metal-framed, stairwell-landing window, to the extent of chiseling the rotten cill back to sound wood and then splicing on a ripped-down length of new cill moulding, recently bought for the purpose. Unfortunately, it turned out that the whole frame was shot, beyond repair, and I have had to remove the whole lot and board-up the bare- brick opening, temporarily, while I source a new frame.
My next problem (and the reason for this post) is that, the heads of the screws fixing the metal frame to the hard-wood frame, are obscured by the glazed, leaded panes of glass, which were only recently renovated! The upshot is that I can't access these screws without removing the glass panes. This I do not want to do!
Removing the window wasn't a problem, as I just mullerred the rotten wood around the metal until it all came away. Any solid wood still attached just got removed by drilling, cutting and chiseling around the remaining screw threads, still in place.
However, as you can probably figure, I now need an alternative way of re-installing the metal frame back into a new wooden frame that I will have made. As I will be unable to fix "through" the metal frame, into the new wooden one, I have been thinking about having a specially- made, hardwood frame, that could "sandwich" the metal frame between 'inner' and 'outer' components, that are independently screw-fixed into the brickwork. Granted that the situation is further complicated by the metal frame being rebated on the internal side, with a flange/ collar/whatever, visible from the outside... to prevent drilling access the original through-frame screw-fixings I presume!?
I fairly sure this could work, but before I commission the joiners, I'd like to know if anyone else has experienced the same, and if there is a more common-practice method that is widely used for solving this issue. I don't want to over-engineer this and incur unnecessary expense.
Looking forward to your responses. Many thanks.