The windows at the tiny house are in decent shape. But the putty (which holds the glass panes in place) is very dried and cracked.

Last fall I took a razor blade and chipped out the old putty and re-applied some new. I didn’t just fine on window number one. But on window number two, I broke the glass in FOUR (count ’em, four) of the nine panes of glass. Sigh. I got impatient. I should have waited until I had a heat gun (which works great for removing the putty). But I didn’t, and I cracked a bunch of panes.

To be clear, I didn’t break the glass entirely. It was still in place, but with hairline cracks. So … I, um … put some packing tape on the cracks and left it for a year. But I thought it best to fix the glass before this coming winter.

In an attempt to remove the glass safely, and to avoid getting shards of glass everywhere, I covered the glass with even more packing tape, on both sides.The idea here was that the packing tape would keep the glass pieces from flying around everywhere. 
I closed my eyes, whacked the glass with a hammer, and hoped for the best. To my surprise, the packing tape worked so well that the glass came out in one piece!

Wow. Putting in the new glass was a cinch, and I re-puttied just before nightfall. One pane down, three more to go …