Spring has sprung, again

The problem with keeping a house blog for so many years is that the stories all start to look very similar. For every spring that we've lived here, we've thatched and overseeded the lawn and hoped to make it look healthy. There's only so much to be said about it. So let's just dispense with that this year. We're doing it and keeping our fingers crossed, as usual. The yard is looking mostly the same, too. So here are just a few updates for this spring.

First on the side of the house - the snowdrops our neighbor gave us came up beautiful, though perhaps a bit short-lived. A fun sign of early spring:

Our cherry tree, which seemed to have a growth spurt last year, is looking happier than usual, and awed the toddler with its pretty pink flowers:

We decided our 6 year old, homemade door wreath was looking a little sad (it shed flowers every season) so we bought a new one that makes us smile:

I can't decide if I should paint the hanger so it blends into the door better or not. Also I feel like the wreath would look better hanging a bit lower but apparently a 12'' drop (which this is) is standard. Thoughts?

Finally, a question - many of our flowering plants, like these hyacinths, are already looking singed (the leaves on the pink and purple) and shriveled (the purple in the back). It's been relatively cool and not particularly dry, and other plants I've seen around town look healthy, so what should we be doing to keep the around longer and happier?

Still more on windows

Are you sick of hearing about windows yet? Because I am. But in the scheme of all the things that we could have to fix around the house, windows might be one of the cheaper and less extreme ones. You may remember that as we wait for our new vinyl ones to be ready to installed upstairs, we had a little incident in our basement. Actually, two incidents, resulting in two broken windows. I wanted them fixed quickly so that the litter boxes could again be hidden out of sight in the unfinished part of the basement (they were temporarily in our finished area of the basement, in plain sight of my elliptical machine, which is not a very inspiring view when exercising) and for security.

First we had to decide how we wanted them fixed. My parents suggested glass block windows, which provide extra security, insulation, leak prevention:

Try as we might, nobody seemed to want to install them for a reasonable price. Some people didn't "do" installations at all, only offering to sell us the supplies at much more than we could find at Home Depot. Others would do both, for at least $500/window (which is about what we're paying for our nice new triple-paned argon-filled fancy shmancy ones upstairs that actually have complicated parts), and others (general contractors) would do the installation if we provided the windows and paid them about $300-400/window.

No thanks.

Next we looked into getting some glass cut. Actually pretty easy to have done at Lowes. We measured the window from the outside and brought the measurements there. For $5/pane, we could get glass. For about $35 for a whole sheet (enough for us to cut two panes ourselves), we could get acrylic. It was then we realized an issue we hadn't considered when we thought about buying glass block: fire escapes. Glass block is impossible to break through. So is acrylic. Now, we do have a walk-up door in our basement, but suddenly I wasn't sure I wanted the "extra security" of not being able to break the windows. People can't get in, but they also can't get out. And besides, that's what home insurance is for, right.

So we went with plain old glass and then had to content with the actual installation. It was a multi-step process, which D pretty much took care of all by himself (someone had to take the pictures...).

1. Chisel out all the old glass and glazing.

This was much harder than we thought, since the glazing was pretty much solid as a rock and applied copiously. Here's a close-up of what had to be removed so that the new pane could sit correctly in the frame:

Removing all that crud was what took most of the installation time. I used a little heat gun to assist but mostly it just took a few hours of chiseling. The finished result wasn't perfect but it was clean enough for the new pane to go in. We also had to be careful since the second pane in each broken window was still in tact, so we didn't want to hammer so hard that we broke that one too.

2. Apply glazing to the empty frame:

3. Carefully set the pane in the frame:

4. Apply more glazing to the other side of the pane. This took a lot more glazing than we thought and we ran out of one tube after just one window (we thought we could use one tube for both the windows).

5. Smooth the glazing with a putty knife and wipe up excess (like that stuff coming out of the caulk gun which fell onto the clean glass just after I took this picture):

6. Let dry, put back into window, and admire. (This picture really emphasizes the difference between new and old glazing--see how white the new one is and how dingy the old one is?)

In all, it cost about $40 (glazing was about $8/tube and we needed to buy the chisel) and maybe 4 hours of (mostly D's) time. It took almost as much time to call contractors for estimates. I think it was definitely worth doing ourselves and not paying for a contractor. Even if they could have removed the glazing faster, I'm sure it would have taken at least an hour or two at some exorbitant labor cost, plus materials. I will give D credit--he broke both windows but at least took care of them quickly and, it seems, correctly. Hopefully the panes don't come crashing out in a couple of days.

edited to add: D thought of the brilliant idea of adding bars to our two back windows, so that we get the security without having the heavy-duty windows. They are only about $25 from Home Depot and we can install them ourselves, plus they can open from the insides, so we are not compromising fire safety. Looks like that will be an upcoming improvement.

A Post About Windows

I had a plan for my first post of the new year. I was going to talk about how now that the holiday season is almost over (and it was an amazingly beautiful and relaxing one in our new place), it's time to get back into the season of home improvement. I was going to talk about how we have a contractor coming to give us an estimate on windows for our upstairs, and talk about all different configurations we are considering. I was. Until this morning.

That post will have to wait because this morning the home ownership gods decided to remind us that we are not always in control of our own repair decisions. At 10:00am on what the weather channel is calling a "blustery" day, this:

Made contact with this:

 Here's a closer look:

We're very glad that it did not shatter the window pane, though it certainly woke us up (it's the side window in the downstairs bedroom where we sleep). For now, we taped it up on both sides:

But we're not sure what to do next. As I mentioned above, a window contractor is coming to give us some upstairs estimates on Monday, so we can have him check this out too. However, we don't want these windows replaced, we just want a new pane. Would this be a better job for a glass specialist? D thinks that it would be worth calling a few places and asking if they are familiar with repairing older windows, to make sure that the window frame isn't damaged during the repair. I have no concept of how much something like this usually costs ($10? $100? $1000?) but obviously it has to get done.

Well, at least this post still turned out to be about windows. More home improvements on the horizon!