Windows
Captain Chaos
We bought our house twelve years ago after deciding that our two bedroom condo was too small for a family of four. I really wanted a yard for the boys to play in. We looked for a year or so and nothing seemed right. Everything we saw was either a dump or far outside of our price range. One day, I was driving around our town and saw a for sale sign in front of a little Cape with white clapboard, blue shutters. It had a good size yard, with a tiny shed in it. Even better the yard had a lot of tall trees which gave it plenty of shade and a sense of privacy.
We looked it up online and the price was something we could afford, barely. The pictures showed a house that hadn’t been updated since Reagan was in office. But the price was right. In the end it turned out that a lot of stuff that was important, like the furnace and water heater were relatively new. Rooms had been painted and at some point the wall to wall carpeting had been ripped out to expose the hardwood floors. We fell in love with it and came up with a plan.
There was a lot of stuff that I loved right away about the place. One, on the outside it looked small but inside it was quite roomy. The bedrooms were all good size and I would have a dedicated office/library. This would come in handy when I started writing books. It had a fireplace but we knew the chimney would have to be inspected/cleaned and probably need some minor work. Ahh, the optimism of youth. The bathrooms would need updating but were serviceable and the kitchen was/is wretched.
It also had a Florida room, which my Long Suffering Wife insists upon calling “the porch”. I refuse to grant the porch diplomatic recognition and insist upon referring to it as the “Florida Room”. I know, I know, I’m petty. But it had the hallmark of a Florida room, in that it had large, aluminum framed louvered windows that stretched from the knotty pine half walls to a few inches under the ceiling. They had huge screens and the over all effect was a room that was from the waist up all windows on three sides.
The windows were ugly as sin and immediately made the list of things to be fixed or replaced. The emphasis in this case being on the word replaced. Only one or two of the five large windows worked. That was reduced one spring day when our new cat tried to do her best Spider Man imitation and cut one of the screens from top to bottom while hanging from it. The consequence of which was no more open windows and a room that was freezing cold in winter and an overheated green house in summer.
In June of 2024 a little tornado blew through our town. Our damages were limited to some twisted gutters, downed tree limbs. That and a large limb from one of the trees broke off and crashed through one of the ugly windows. I pretty quickly converted the limb into firewood (we attended to the chimney a few years ago) and a piece of clear vinyl was taped over the window. I am not handy and even if I were it was job best left to the professionals. Who in this case were United Home Experts. https://unitedhomeexperts.com/ashland-ma-01721-siding-roofing-windows-doors/
It took them a couple of months to get the new custom windows in from their supplier it took them two days to replace all the windows, complete with new trim. It also took them 90 minutes to fix or replace the broken gutters. The end result of which are huge beautiful windows that have transformed a room that I had come to hate. The room feels, lighter, roomier and airier. I find myself going out there several times a day just to enjoy it. It’s quite possible that the last couple of nights I’ve even enjoyed a short snort of bourbon out there while listening to the crickets sing their songs of early fall.
I was going to write a clever Substack piece about perspectives and use the new windows/old windows as sort lowbrow/highbrow metaphor. Instead, I wrote a comparison piece about perspectives between my two series and the two protagonists. It turns out that simple, direct, writing was a better choice. Let the perspectives stay with the writing and the appreciation of a home upgrade stay where it belongs. Now I’m going to take my cup of coffee out the Three Season room (it’s still not a porch) and enjoy the view and gain some new perspective on the world outside.