I’m embarrassed to say we’ve had our new windows for 10 months now and I’ve yet to clean them. Literally, the fancy way they tip in so you can clean top and bottom, inside and out, was the reason we chose these windows.
The salesman spent an hour in our kitchen with a sample window explaining what it was made of and why it was superior to all its competitors and all about the financing. Blah, blah, blah — show me how it works. He gave us one quick demonstration and out the door he went. After the installation, I tested out one window to see for myself how it worked and then walked away like it never happened.
Well, not exactly. New windows come with new stickers stuck to each and every one of them. I was working on removing them one by one. Carefully peeling them off in one big piece. Except for the upstairs bathroom. The boys were in there ciphering on some updates to the room and decided to help me with the sticker. Bad idea.
My boys don’t have fingernails to get the sticker started. They had it all kinds of goobered up. I eventually got it, but what a mess. The sticker on the window in the stairwell can stay where it is unless I get one of those fancy ladders that goes all different which-ways.
I have had to clean the three windows that our Beagle Boy Cletus frequents. The one by our bed gets yucked up when he shakes the cobwebs out of his head every morning and slings slobber all over it. I wonder if I should be washing the walls, too. He can’t just be hitting the glass exclusively, can he?
The windows facing the driveway in the living room and the football room are Cletus’ favorites for keeping tabs on everyone’s comings and goings. He may get a little too close, as evidenced by the doggie hieroglyphics he draws with his nose.
We’ve lived in our house for 27 years now and it’s the first time I’ve cleaned most of the windows. We could only open about half of them as they were painted or caulked shut. Half the time we didn’t bother trying to open them since we’d have had to take down the plastic I put up in the fall.
There were few if any storm windows and we couldn’t handle the thick frost that developed on the inside of the glass in the winter. That still happened every year, but we were relatively warm with that thick layer of plastic between us and the outside elements.
I’m very thankful I never have to do that again. I always had a new plan on how I was going to do it an easier way and it was always a colossal pain in the you-know-what. For whatever reason, stores don’t put the plastic out for sale until way after it’s needed. They’ve got Christmas stock out a month before Halloween, but plastic for windows doesn’t show up til mid-November.
I got to where I was hoarding those boxes of plastic. I found them at yard sales and rummage sales and when the stores did have them, I’d buy enough for two years. Then I could put the plastic up whenever I wanted, which was especially helpful when I started putting it up on the outside, too (downstairs anyway). Late November is not the time to be wrestling with a 2×5-foot piece of plastic and some two-sided tape in Northeastern Ohio fall winds.
I don’t know what I’ll do with all the spare time I have on my hands now that I’m no longer tasked with hanging plastic. I do know I’m loving the view we have from our new windows. We’re seeing things we never really could before. The autumn colors of the leaves against the bright blue sky are beautiful and I can’t wait to see the changes the new windows will bring for our winter heating costs. Woo-hoo!
