Call me Frugalein

Frugalein. Rhymes with Madeline, or Coraline.

Before we replaced them last year, most of our windows were broken, crazy drafty, or the equivalent of greenhouse glass. There were only three in the house that worked just fine, but even they ended up on the chopping block. They wouldn't have matched the new ones so that was pretty much that. As the installation date for the new windows neared, the prospect of sending the three good windows to the dump began to bother me more and more. And then I realized I could keep them. When install day rolled around, I asked the folks doing the work to save the three good ones for me and they did.

So, I bet you are dying (just dying!) to know why I wanted to keep those windows. This time it wasn't the packrat in me. I swear it wasn't. It was Frugalein. She's the queen of being frugal (duh). Frugalein had figured out how to squeeze a bit more use out of them.

She thought of our garage window:

It was like this when we bought the house even though broken glass is a code violation. Normally when you buy a house, an inspection can turn up stuff like this, sometimes lots of stuff like this. You (the buyer) take the results of the inspection back to the seller and either renegotiate the sale price or maybe the seller will agree to fix the problems for you.

I wouldn't know. When a bank is the seller (as it was in our case) they sometimes won't do either, and that's how the bank that held our house was. When our inspection turned up problems we knew they were our problems to deal with.

Call it luck. The three windows that were removed from my house are just the right size to replace the windows in the garage. The one in the picture was broken. Another was boarded up, and the third won't open (probably something to do with those ancient weights on the inside).

This is one of my favorite kinds of projects. I get to be outside on a gorgeous day working in the shade of our garage (I'm no good in direct sunlight), the work itself is a mental and physical diversion from my daily life, the project costs nothing so Frugalein loves it and I love making Frugalein happy, it recycles something that would have been difficult to dispose of, it upgrades my property (code compliance!), and doing it reminds me that I am capable of this and so much more.

I'll post another picture when I've actually gotten the window in. We're getting there . . .