On the day you close on the purchase of your first home, there are a thousand things running through your mind: Is the mortgage company really going to fork over those many thousands of dollars on just my signature? How does this tax escrow adjustment thing really work? Will the electricity and the water really function, and will the gas fireplace explode and send me heavenward the first time I light it?
One thing is probably not on most people’s minds in that most hectic of times, and certainly wasn’t on mine when I closed on my bungalow in August of 1986. Namely, hey, where the heck are the screens that come with these combination storm/screen windows that the listing agreement said were included in the purchase?
As a two-year veteran of real estate coverage at the time, I knew enough to have had a thorough home inspection performed. I’d dutifully accompanied the inspector on his rounds, running through all the major mechanical and structural systems of the circa 1920 house, making notes here and there and pretty much resigned to the fact that the “operable, below average condition and/or beyond average age limits” checkmarks that most of my soon-to-be residence was receiving did nothing more than prove that, yes, I was buying an old house.
For some reason on that none-too-warm late April day, it did not occur to me to investigate the window screens.
It wasn’t that I hadn’t had any training in storms and screens. Grandfather Kerch’s house in Freeport was an older model whose windows needed the twice-annual switch-off of storms and screens.
Once each spring and once each fall, on our regular Sunday family dinner visits, the window chore would be performed: the storms or screens rigorously washed and installed, their counterparts meticulously labeled as to their proper location using masking tape.
As a child helping my father and grandfather, it never occurred to me to ask for the ritual to be explained in real estate agent-ese.
To me, the storms and screens seemed a perfect combination–you took one off and put the other one on. That’s why it was pretty much a surprise all those years later when I discovered that, as far as realty listing info was concerned, combination storms/screens meant the two were actually part of the same window.
This makes no sense, when you think about it. The function of a storm window is to keep the outside weather out; a screen is meant to let the fresh air in. They can’t coexist in the same frame.
But sure enough, old storm windows attempted to do just that. Several of mine had three small screens in the bottom, with a wooden arm that swung down.
Of course, they are screens in realty agent dreams only. But they are magical. For some reason in the dead of winter they allow as much frigid air to pass as pleases, regardless of the position of the arm, yet in the stifling swelter of summer they refuse to let through even a whisper of a breeze.
Still, that would be tolerable if there were full-size screens on just a couple of windows, something that I initially thought was not a problem. When I went to my basement in that first August, there were plenty of screens to be found, neatly stacked. But as I found throughout that first weekend when I tried to reenact from memory that changeover accomplished so many times with Grandpa Kerch, none of the screens fit any actual window openings. More magic.
Seeing as how they were bewitched anyway, I decided to leave the windows pretty much to themselves from then on. (I do have two windows and my half a second floor that miraculously came with matching screens and storms, and they do get the twice-a-year switch.)
But, as you may know, the Savvy Spouse has had enough. And thus I started Wishing for Windows. New ones. Modern ones. Opening and closing ones. Clean ones.
More Top Picks Best Air Purifiers For Dorm Rooms
Vinyl Vic was called in. Between the time I write this and you read it, a truck loaded with 16 examples of the latest that window manufacturing technology can offer–not to mention what a sizable check from HEL (or Home Equity Lending) makes possible–will have started its journey here.
Next week: Vinyl Vic and George the Measurer.
———-
Email: [email protected]