See More Glass

This...


... is the setting sun shining through the old glass in the windows in my office and settling on the otherwise not-so-very-pretty wall. Those colored things are thumbtacks. You can ignore them.

Unfortunately, this...


... is what the window-casing looks like. You can't so much tell by this picture, but it isn't just a paint job that it needs. They're rotten, and they've got to go.

It is for to weep, because when we first moved in here everybody, everybody, everybody told us that we had to put in all new windows -- there was even some sort of government grant program to pay for them -- and I refused, refused, refused. We wouldn't have qualified for the grant program, anyway, as it turned out. And we've paid the price in heating bills (though we've had bigger problems than this with heating bills, to be sure). But I just could not, could not, could not be responsible for ripping out that wavy glass.

Now that we've been here for a while, though, I've had time to look around and make a rational decision. Such as it is. I mean, we have met one another, right? And the conclusion that I (by which I mean we, sort of) have come to is:

The ones in the living room are staying, because they're beautiful and I spent a little time stripping the paint off them. I don't remember how long, exactly...


And it's curtains (so to speak) for all the rest.

This is not as heartless as it sounds: of the twenty-one windows in the house (not counting attic or basement) only twelve are actually old.

Three got replaced before we moved in.

Six were in the rotten room.

The two in the dining room have already, inexplicably, had their original, antique, beautiful casings replaced by ugly nondescript stuff. Not by us.


These two in the office are, like I said, rotting clear away.

And the two in the kitchen -- well.

When we half-redid our kitchen eighteen months ago, somebody -- who shall remain nameless but who does happen to live here and who isn't me -- took it upon himself (see? not me) in the absence of the nominal, official Owner (c'est moi, though I try not to play that card to often -- like, at all), to decide that the two windows in there would be replaced. Said "Somebody" tore out a good bit of the casings before Moi saw and stopped him, and then the torny bits got left out in the rain. They are really, most sincerely dead.

The reason there are still gaping holes there, however, which I cleverly insulated with packing tape last winter -- and by "reason" I mean aside from the fact that we are equally lacking in both money and motivation -- was that we (meaning I) hoped to be able to salvage trim from somewhere else and piece it in. But that's just not going to happen. There isn't anywhere else in the house to take it from. Ah well, one of those windows is mostly useless anyway. Plus, someday when we win the lottery again we're going to get around to finishing this kitchen, and then a few new shiny windows in there will make much more sense than the patched-up, not-actually-wavy and mostly-useless old ones.

In other words, Somebody was right.

But you will not, will not, will not tell him I said so.

But Soft...

I don’t know where you live, but it has been unseasonably cold around here lately – I bet it was only like 45 degrees last night! Or more like 55. Or maybe 60?

I don’t know what the heck degrees it was, but I know that as soon as I got out of bed this morning I had to run around closing all the windows. Which would have been a smart thing to do before I got into bed last night, so I wouldn’t have wound up suffocating myself with my pillows over my head to keep warm (because that’s so much easier than getting up for another blanket), and I wouldn’t have slept through the alarm clock (because two big downy pillows over your head do tend to muffle noise), so I wouldn’t have lost an hour this morning, which wouldn’t have funked up my whole routine, so I would have been out of the shower long before just this very second (okay, ten minutes; I’m not still wet or anything), and I wouldn’t have had to skip my watermelon-and-“Big Love” Tuesday lunchbreak.

If only there were some modern-type device to tell a gal ahead of time what the weather’s going to be, so she could plan ahead and shut her windows…

But hey, at least it’s not like there’s any heat that’s going to go kicking itself on and warming up the entire eastern seaboard!

Anyway, I shut all the windows and I got my coffee and I sat down at my desk and I thought “Now why's it still so cold in here? And why does it still sound like there’s a window open somewhere?”

Ummmm, could it be this giant gaping hole where your front door’s supposed to be?

Oh! Goody! Crap! You scared me! I thought you had gone back to England, or taken the vow, or died or something. Balls. I mean, nice to see you, how've you been...?

Turns out there is a magical modern device that predicts weather, and it seems to think it might get warm again someday, but in the meantime autumn approacheth, and it mightn’t be a bad idea to have a front door to greet it at when it arrives.

If I hung the blasted thing back up unfinished, Johnny would kill me. (Actually, no he wouldn't. I’d fight him off with photos of the bathroom he’s left half-done for going on a year now. He would be powerless against me…) But Goody would kill me for sure. And, if I were any kind of prudent girl, I'd kill myself.

So I did it. Okay? Are you happy? I finished stripping the g-d door.

Sort of.

I got all the paint off the flat parts, but I’d been admonished – under penalty of death – to get the heat gun nowhere near the panes of glass. Because this is what happens when you get heat guns too near glass:

(Which is also why you never bother to finish stripping that particular piece of window hardware, which you had to leave in place because it wouldn’t come off no matter which screwdriver you used – and, now that you think of it, maybe you broke that glass when you tried to use the power drill attachment and it slipped, and you only told Johnny that you broke it with the heat gun, but, at any rate -- what was my point?)

Oh, yeah: replacing glass in this door is much more complicated than replacing it in a window (which, as you can see, we’re right on top of), so don’t Fugger it up.

So I had to leave the near-the-glass bits the way I found them.

If it’s up to me, I don’t care if they just get sanded and painted over, but I’m sure Johnny will have some big complicated process for doing it “the right way.” Which is the other reason I quit when I did. Because, believe it or not (and you know me, so form your own opinions), I was actually planning on sanding down the door after stripping it this afternoon (or, actually, I was planning on doing it this morning, but old marshmallow-head changed the plans on that one).

But the more I thought about it, I wasn’t sure that was the right next step. And I hate sanding more than anything. And if I sanded it down today, only to have Johnny tell me I had to do something else to it and then sand it down again, I might’ve taken this thing to them both:

And so help me, Goody, if you say one word about the "g-d door" comment I made up there, I'm coming for you next...