Tuesday, July 8, 2014

A breath of fresh air

One of the things we knew right away that we were going to need to do to this house was replace some windows. The windows that were in the house I think were the original ones. Wood framed single-pane double-hung windows. That were painted and siliconed shut. And probably covered with lead paint. As cute and charming as they were, they weren't practical. Even though the author of my new favorite book would burn down our house for doing so, we replaced the four front windows with vinyl ones.

For some reason I'm the one that measured the windows to decide what size to order. Bad idea. When we took the first old window out and got ready to put in our new special-order window, it was ten inches too small. Apparently those wood windows have huuuge casings (in order to fit in the sash weights to keep the window open I guess).



Anyway, thank the Lord that Lowe's took our special-order windows back and gave us a refund no questions asked. So we decided to just buy some in-stock windows and put those in instead. We saved like $400+ doing it that way so that was nice. They aren't quite as "high quality" (whatever that means). But they are still nice Jeld-Wen energy-efficient windows (and they open! unlike the old ones- anything would have been an improvement).

My brother and our friend Mike came over to help Ben put in two of the windows. It actually didn't take as long as I thought it would. And by the end of they day (and a couple trips to Home Depot...we could only fit one window at a time in our car!) we had two lovely new windows that OPEN! With SCREENS! They are also larger than the old ones. Well there is more glass, the old windows had such a large casing that even though the measurement is the same, the glass part was quite a bit smaller.








So a few weeks later, Ben went to work on replacing the other two. We picked up two more in-stock windows, took the old ones out and got the new ones in! (By "we" I mean Ben. I helped hold them in place while he screwed them in. That's the entirety of my contribution...)





Old window on the left, new on the right!

All done! Now it was time to watch some 4th of July fireworks from our porch :)

So just in time for the hoootttt weather, we have some windows we can open WITH SCREENS so we can get a little air in here and NOT bugs. The windows in our bedroom were replaced at some point with aluminum ones so they at least open, but they don't have screens. And there are a lot of bugs around here. So we just need to get some screens for those until we replace them. For now though, we're just waiting on the bathroom window and we will replace that one. The rest will have to wait for another time. (And more money!). We can't wait to get these windows trimmed and finished! That's the next project!

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