It is a gray and dreary early fall morning. The Savvy Spouse is sitting at the dining room table with a steaming cup of coffee, staring through the three openings in which our aging and inoperable dining room windows used to reside. She wonders whether the rain or the new windows, still a Wish, will get here first.
George the Measurer is waiting near his truck, his crew also waiting. They were here at 7:30, eager to begin. They had the dining room windows gone in no time and were chomping at the bit to move to the bedrooms. The Savvy Spouse put them on hold, insisting that they set the dining room right first.
It’ll be OK, she was told. The truck with the replacement windows was only 15 minutes behind, they insisted. That was an hour ago.
If the Possible Impending Marvelous Move of Steve, PIMMs for short, had run into snags in the last few months, they were nothing like this. Stay or go from the 70-some-year-old bungalow, gaping holes in the walls were not going to be a good thing.
Why, oh why, did I add Wishing for Windows to The List anyway? Because I was too lazy to clean, paint and caulk the old ones, I remind myself.
And then the truck pulls onto the street, with Vinyl Vic riding shotgun.
Real windows are being unloaded–bright, white, clean windows, windows that move up and down, with screens that fill half the frame instead of three dime-sized holes at the bottom of a “combination storm/screen.” Windows made possible through the good auspices of HEL, or Home Equity Lending.
It has been just five weeks since Vinyl Vic made his sales pitch in our living room, just four weeks since we finalized the deal. It is, of course, still going to be too late to enjoy any summer breezes this year. Ah, but the added energy efficiency of Low-E glass and double-insulated track construction will make winter that much more tolerable, I tell myself.
The Savvy Spouse eyeballs the windows on the front lawn. The garden window for the kitchen is impossibly large, she insists. Let me see the coordinated trim colors for the capping and caulk in these other boxes, she says. What makes this glass so easy to clean, she asks. There is no way they built, in Ohio on Sept. 22, 16 windows, no two of which are the same size, and every one of them will fit, I fret.
But the first one is already in place. Whoa, whoa, whoa, the Savvy Spouse interjects. You’re not going to anchor those into that ancient wood, are you? Look at the holes, look at the old paint, (oh, geez, look at the spider lairs).
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George the Measurer steps in. George, who exudes an Old World craftsman type of confidence, has seen it all, seen hundreds of houses like ours. I could take my truck and ram it into these boards and they wouldn’t give an inch, he intones. He and Vic explain the installation procedure, how the insulation will be packed, where the caulking will be. Window No. 1 is done. Window No. 2 is being moved into place.
“You know when you go in for surgery,” Vinyl Vic says, “and even if there isn’t much to it they still put a sheet over you and put you out for a while? Let us work and 9 hours from now you’ll see the results.”
Given what they might find in opening up the bowels of the bungalow, it doesn’t sound like such a bad idea to head for the anesthesia of work. It is not really Vinyl Vic in whose hands I am leaving the house, but George the Measurer, and about that I feel all right.
I’m home early at 4:30. The windows are in. They look wonderful. They smell awful, what with all the caulk. The garden window in the kitchen is impossibly large; it has more shelf space inside than the rest of the kitchen combined.
When the Savvy Spouse returns, she too is impressed. The extra cost of having mullions in the upper half of the windows has paid off by giving the house a touch of the suburban, but just a touch. PIMMS is on hold; the List is shorter by one item.
“But you know,” the Savvy Spouse sighs as we peel manufacturer’s stickers from the windows, “the new windows really do make the kitchen look shabby.”
Uh huh. Next stop: HEL’s Kitchen.
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