Gotta keep that baby warm!

This is baby's "window on the world".

Since baby's been in his incubator for nine months now, all toasty and snug as a bug, he has no idea just how COLD his new home is. Now, don't think that we're not going to hike up the thermostat. We have to. You can't keep a baby happy in a sixty degree house.

But we had to make some "minor improvements" in the meantime to ensure that baby's house is an energy efficient. Put in brutally honest terms, to ensure that we can pay the bills that heat baby's house!

Our house is nearly sixty years old and it has the original casement windows. While they're pretty to look at, the Northeast's extreme temperature fluctuations, UV rays, and time itself have all taken an extensive toll on the windows. We might as well have had Saran-wrap on the windows. We just had them installed this week, and not a minute too late.



Here the upstairs window has just been replaced. They'll do the big downstairs one the next day.


Voila one new window, freshly installed. It looks so strange with no molding or trim!








I'm fascinated by all the layers in this shot. This is what it takes to keep out the elements??

The new windows are amazing! For one thing you can't feel a breeze anymore. Now there's a novel concept. And they're so warm. Did I mention that you can open and shut them without the assistance of pliers and a hammer? That actually saves a lot of time, you know.

We had all of the upstairs windows replaced as well as the downstairs front window. It was so cool watch them rip out the old windows. Normally, I get a little nostalgic about change, but in this case I was happy to see them go, because everytime I looked at them all I saw were piles of dollar bills going up in smoke. The contractor told us that a few of the windows had sustained the worst damage that he'd ever seen. Hmm, that would explain the outrageous heating bills.

Here are a few photos of the new windows.

The most significant modification that we had to make was to select a 2-unit casement set-up instead of replicating the 3-window casement that used to be there. Today's building code standards require an egress width that was wider than the old windows that we had. I had never given thought to getting out via the window in case of an emergency. While Joe and I would probably have been able to squeeze through those old windows in a pinch, others may not have fared so well. Scary thought!

The other thing you may have noticed is that the wood is a little light in color. That's because it's unstained. Oh Pella will stain it for you alright, you just have to give them your first born. :-) And , after all the hard work that I put in over the last nine months, that's not going to happen. Looks like Joe will be keeping busy this spring.

I'll have to report out on the energy savings in the next few months. I am PRAYING that it's substantial!