Signed, sealed, delivered

Windows are in!

The day has come, the day that I can finally report to you that we have windows! Saturday was long indeed and on Sunday morning I finally stood INSIDE and watched as the forest silhouette danced to life in the morning light, wrapped in a blanket, warm beverage in hand, exhaustion forgotten for a few magical moments.

The windows arrived in farm style on Saturday morning. The mud on the road up to our house is worth a blog post of its own and the delivery truck couldn’t get them to our door so they rode up on the zoom boom. Just look at that beautiful package making it’s way to our front door… a package containing our front door!

These Innotech windows are, I’m told, the heaviest in the industry so it was no easy feat for these two men to install 10 windows and a door within the day. First up, Ryan and Morgan moved all the windows into the house.

I suppose any big project can’t possibly go off without a single hitch and the first hiccup of this one showed it’s ugly face as the windows were being unloaded from the crate. Morgan quickly noticed that the windows came with flanges, that’s the edge that sticks out beyond the integral structure of the window. Flanges themselves are not a problem only that the window boxes were not designed to have flanges. Because the walls of the house are so deep the windows can’t sit flush with the outside of the house. They need to sit in the middle of the wall which means they are set in from both the outside and the inside of the house.

I assure you the moments were tense leading up to the router being taken to our windows. While I do believe I have the stomach to handle many a difficult thing, I do not apparently have the stomach of a carpenter. The moment Morgan told me he was going to cut our windows is, I’m sure, the moment by third gray hair emerged upon my head. I took this photo and that was, in fact, the last I saw of the window project until much later in the day. Some challenges are better confronted by a carpenter and his apprentice and not a man and his wife… who was freaking out… about said carpenter cutting up the windows. And so I left. And I drove far far away for the rest of the day… to pick up the kids back in the city. It was best that I was not present for this particular problem solving process.

I do know that Morgan spends some of his days at work solving problems of grand proportions, sorting unexpected circumstances and fixing human error on the scale of enormous buildings and budgets. I never doubted he would figure out how to fit windows into our little house when they showed up an unexpected size but I myself have zero capacity or experience to envision a solution to such a predicament and had only visions of disastrous happenings. It was good then, that I wasn’t present when he ripped out the window boxes he had built. It was good that this day it was Ryan who was Morgan’s right hand man and who held the space with his calm adding I’m sure, an infusion of his dry humor so that by the time I returned six windows and a door were installed in the house!

This particular story would not be complete if I didn’t share with you the details of the enormous mess that is caused by routering flanges off of one’s windows. Observe the piles of plastic snow on the floor and take special note of how it even has the sticky, staticky capacity to decorate walls. How lovely! Nothing like an extra little clean up project to pass the evening.

But here, back to the main attraction. Look at the view out those windows! I’m holding off pulling the film from them until the siding is on the outside and all saw dust causing projects are finished in the house. It’ll be so satisfying to pull them off at that moment and have sparkly clean windows to gaze through. Don’t you think?

Look at this team? Morgan delivered the loft windows to Ryan via the man-lift from the outside. This first of many projects these two will tackle together was indeed a raging success, hiccups and all.

By the time the sun set at the end of the day the last four windows were installed. From the back of the house you can see the window over the kitchen sink and the loft windows near the roof. Note the angle of the shed roof from this view as well. The window on the east side of the house is in bathroom.

On Sunday morning, we watched the meadow wake up as the coffee percolated on the wood fire. Bit by bit the space is feeling like home. Our move-in day approaches quickly and it’s evident at this point that the house won’t be finished when we move in. The kids and I have been reading the Little House on the Prairie book series and talking about the pioneering/homesteading journey of the Ingalls family. We do truly understand their joy when Pa brings home glass for their windows, and when the well is first dug and they no longer need to go to the river for water, and the day the fireplace is ready in the house and Ma can cook inside when it’s cold. I myself was cursing the wind that kept blowing out my stove flame as I cooked breakfast outside on Sunday morning, my fingers freezing every time I had to pull off my gloves to light a new match. It was my opportunity to connected deeply with Ma and a lineage of women who have fed their families without the comforts of modern luxuries.

I won’t have kitchen cabinet doors when we move in. My countertops will still be plywood as will my floors. It is guaranteed to be chaos for weeks after we move and all I can think about is the extraordinary blessing that my windows are, the fact that I have running water in the house and that I can warm a kettle on my wood stove. Simple things, sacred things, things often overlooked. These are the things that humble me with gratitude.

Many blessings to you from our simple home on this sacred earth.