Into the Groove

In my continuing efforts to class this place up, I spent yesterday afternoon rescreening four of my windows. The day that I moved into this house, Mother of Ken had a fit about how dirty the window screens on the living room windows were and she ripped them off and threw them in the bathtub to try to clean them. Unfortunately, twelve years of the Disgustingtons doesn't come off that easily.

So, four years later, I decided that replacing the window screens was my only option and that it couldn't be that difficult. I also had holes in the bathroom window screen and in one of the bedroom window screens.

Here's my set up with one of the living room screens--screening, splining, splining tool, utility knife, screw driver, and the home repair book that Father of Ken gave me so that I would stop calling him every time I needed to replace a shower head:

Kenna "helping:"

So, after you remove the old splining and screen from the frame, you cut a new piece of screen the same size as the outside of the frame:


The next step is to roll the splining into the groove on the frame. Here, I had to use two pieces of splining side by side because the grooves were wider than my splining and Home Depot is 20 minutes away.




Cut off the excess splining with a utility knife:



Trim excess screen with the utility knife (carefully, people--I learned this from bitter experience) and then you have a finished rescreened window:



The screens for the bathroom window and one of the guest room windows are finished and ready to be replaced:



New screen in place in the bathroom:

New screen in the bedroom:

New screen in the living room--see how clean it is now?

While I had everything taken apart, I decided to experiment with the curtains on the picture window. So, what do you think? I usually just use the valances, but I am trying the longer panels to see how I like them. Thoughts? Obviously, if I go with this, I will tie the longer panels back. I thought that the longer panels might help keep things warmer this winter and then I could go back to the valances alone for warmer weather.

Papa Don't Preach, Part II

The time has come, gentle readers, for my window installation. You may remember my previous post explaining that this was going to be done by some Amish men and I promised to blog more about it. At about 8:30 this morning, the trailer pulled up in front of my house and out came Non-Amish Guy and Amish Guy (the guy I really liked before, Favorite Amish, wasn't here today):




It was pulled by this truck (which has one of those OBX stickers on the window--I'm guessing this truck belongs to Non-Amish Guy):

They got right to work--out came the power tools, which you can see to the left of the trailer door:

After clarifying that they were supposed to trim the windows as part of the installation process (at which time the Amish guy told me that he couldn't reach Nelson on his cell phone to check with him, which is why he was asking me), they began to install the windows.

Here is my kitchen window before:

And after:

The window in my laundry room before (this window shared an opening with the one in the kitchen, so the new window is a single window that is larger but fits into the same opening and it slides so that I can have part of it open in the kitchen and the other part open in the laundry room):

And after:

The window on the west side of the laundry room before:

And after:

This is the window in the loft that a bird once used to infiltrate my home. A view before:

And after (now it can be pulled down from either the top or the bottom and it also swings out so that I can clean it):

So this is what the exterior of the house looks like now on the west side:

And a view of the awning open:

A view of the exterior of the house on the south side before:

And after:

I wish I could make the photos go side by side, but I can't. Sorry.

They finished all of this in three and a half hours, including vacuuming after themselves (well, Non-Amish Guy did that part). Then I had to pay them (Amish Guy handled this part) and they were on their way after I told them for the fifteenth time how much I liked the windows. If you look closely at the passenger side of the truck as they start to pull away, you can see Amish Guy's blue shirt.

Unfortunately, I did not get to ask them what they use to tame their facial hair, how they justify using power tools for this purpose, why they had cell phones, or whether or not they liked the movie "Witness." I did get to shake Amish Guy's hand, though ;-)

Papa Don't Preach, Part I: My New Windows

Gentle readers, you may have noticed in my last post the octagonal porthole windows above the window boxes. There are four of them on the front and side of my house. One of them opens and has a screen. One of them opens, but has no mechanism to keep it open and also lacks a screen. Two of them cannot be opened at all. So, we decided to have the three useless ones replaced with normal rectangular windows that seal along with the window at the top of the house in my study, which has no screen and also is not sealed well.

Two months ago, a gentleman named Nelson come to the house to give me an estimate for the work. He works for a company that manufactures the windows locally, which I think is nice. He measured, we discussed the specific kinds of windows that should be placed in each opening, he gave me a reasonable estimate, and he left. I called the next day to tell him that we wanted to go ahead with the project and sent him a deposit.

About a week later, I received the receipt in the mail. It looked like a fairly normal receipt except for the box toward the top, which was printed in large font with the words "Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life." I thought it was a little strange, but then forgot about it.

Two months passed and I hadn't heard from Nelson, who said that he would send some of his colleagues to the house to measure one more time before they manufacture the windows. So I called him last week to find out what was happening and finally got him to commit to sending these guys this afternoon after 4:00. I made sure that I was home by 4 and I waited. And I waited. And soon it was after 5:30 and there was still no sign of these guys. I was mentally preparing for a beat down with Nelson.

Suddenly, a truck pulls up to the house with a trailer attached and the name of this company on the side. I went to the door to let them in and I saw two Amish men walking toward the house. The Amish are installing my new windows! Now a lot of things make sense, not the least of which is the "message" on the receipt. They were very nice, talkative men and they are coming back in a few weeks to handle the window installation, so I'll blog about it more then. What I'm most excited about is that Amish people wear pants with an extremely high rise, so there will be no male cleavage sightings while they are here.