My favorite spot in this house to sit and enjoy a cup of coffee is right in front of the front window, with the morning sun streaming in, where I can relax and watch the cars go by. It's an old fashioned idea of entertainment, the sort of thing my grandparents' generation used to talk about as a perfectly normal pastime. My street is busy enough that this activity (is "activity" really the right word?) isn't quite as boring as it seems at first blush. What it also hasn't been thus far is quiet. The front window was a giant single pane of glass, five and a half by ten feet, clamped in to an aluminum frame. Every time it got really cold (so most of the last two months), the inside of the window was coated in condensation. Some nights it froze in a strip of ice on the inside along the window sill.
I was informed the day we first toured the house that if we bought it, we would replace the front window before the first winter was through. Actually, it was suggested that it would happen before the first winter began, but we missed that mark. I thought we could delay that until my career took off, and that we'd be okay the first winter. Once I saw the first coat of condensation I knew we wouldn't wait that long. A window was ordered back in November, and arrived at the store in December, but we had to wait all the way to today to get an appointment for installation. For ten days, we've had a countdown every morning and night, while we stood and looked at the foggy glass. Today took forever to arrive.
Nothing we do ever seems easy. We have several cases of "this is the worst I've ever seen in my decades long professional career" with contractors. Once again, we presented a problem to the men hired to work on our house. The glue holding in the window was ancient ("You're not allowed to use this stuff anymore," the guy said), and it had been applied thickly and baked into place for generations. It took an hour and a half to cut it out. First they tried a utility knife and heat gun, but after a frustrating effort with three men, they switched to an electric grout saw. Even that took forty-five minutes to finish. They very nearly had the window loose, and then one crack popped, and took out the last fourteen inches or so of one side. They pulled the rest loose while it was still daylight, and after a couple failures, they cut it into manageable strips so that mountain man I live with could use it for the greenhouse he intends to build. The front of my house was completely open to the elements for hours, as the sun went down and the snow started to fall. The air was, shall we say, crisp in my living room. The aluminum frame had been installed solidly but not conventionally. There was a thick layer of mortar all around it, between it and the brick. But the aluminum was also directly touching part of the drywall. Remember the discussion of condensation? Yeah. There are things I don't want to think about. I had to watch while they cut an inch and a half off of the nice, wide, cultured marble sill that I had liked and wanted to preserve. Now it's too narrow for most of my cats to be able to sit on it comfortably. I think Athena might still fit.
Once the window was in place, the moment the last pane went in, my home was noticeably quieter. It was amazing, the difference. The installer and I waited for a car to go by, and even before it was foamed and caulked in place, the traffic noise was almost non-existent. At one point I was sitting, facing away from the window, and the contractor asked, "Did you hear that big box truck drive by?" I said, "What truck?" He said, "Window works."
No comments:
Post a Comment