Hello,

It wasn't that long ago that people lived in open spaces adjoining the stall.

Here where I'm living, right now on these winter days, moisture collects and condenses and at times drips down the window panes and the wood becomes wet.

So the painter will overlap the glass by a millimeter giving a bridge to shed the water. Then the problem becomes the carpenter's who will make troughs and profiles and openings to guide the water outside. Maybe there are better solutions.

The inside edges of a window sash with its munitions are profiled in order to shed this water. Even the Shakers who mostly avoided superfluous profiling knew the function it served on windows. Personally I learnt about it when I built my work shop. In an effort at simplicity I left the inside window edges angular and then watched water pool there on those flat surfaces.

The joinery techniques for windows can also be specifically adapted, using draw-boarding and avoiding glue which creates a vapor barrier and using bridle joints where they can be used at the bottom corners in place of mortise and tenon will facilitate moisture exchange.

That moisture is always there and comes mostly from the people (or other sentient beings) who are in the rooms. It will migrate to the coolest surfaces which in rooms with single glazing will be the windows. This can be an advantage because otherwise those cool surfaces might just be somewhere, as the writer DL Bahler points out, like where the timbers come up against the infill or the window jam meets the brick or other inaccessible places. When these are covered with the wrong paints or sealed with a polymer the moisture accumulates, when the temperature gets right bacteria and insects get active and damage the wood which can eventually need to be fixed.

No, I don't think a limewash will solve all the problems though it has its place and I also think that certain approaches to fixing perceived problems maybe lead to their own inherent disadvantages. Could be a conceptual problem instead of false action.

Greetings,

Don Wagstaff