Renovations Underway

At long last some of the housing renovation projects are underway.

The men arrived this morning to install new doors and windows.

This has become an entire house-fix-it project. It initially started out as a door replacement project. The Pella representative gave us a good price on new windows, too, and so we decided to replace those as well. 
Astute long-time readers may remember we replaced the windows in 2010. Those windows failed, and the company that made them, Gorell, went bankrupt. Southwest Sunroom & Windows out of Salem sold us these windows and installed them, but wouldn't or couldn't honor the window warranty, only their installation warranty, which did us little good. We fought with them for five years as the windows failed one after the other. The company that bought out Gorell, Soft-Lite, did replace some of the windows but it was a constant battle to have the replacements made, and then the new windows fit loosely, which only let in that much more air.



That was the biggest waste of money - and probably the biggest mistake - we have ever made in our 35 years of marriage.

This is what the windows look like now. It is hard to take a picture of a window that shows this clearly, but here goes:

I think you can really tell from the bottom one how bad the glass is. That is not dirt. That is glass failure. This is the worst one in the house but several of the windows have spots or areas where you can't see out of them because the glass failed.

The remaining project involves flooring. We weren't planning on replacing flooring this year but a leaking dishwasher changed those plans. We will be replacing the kitchen parquet hardwood with tile, and we decided while we were in the middle of tearing things up we may as well pull up the carpet and put down hardwood floors.

We are hoping this will help my allergies, if nothing else.

Lots of hammering going on now with the new installation. I'll show you some of that tomorrow.