To me, part of what makes me happy to DIY is also knowing when it's time to LOPDI (let other people do it). One example of this: the replacement of all of the windows on the front of our new house, something that is clearly beyond my means. So once we closed on the house, we enlisted the help of a local DC window replacement company who set us up with an estimate, measured the seven frames, and ordered replacement Weather Shield wood windows.

The old windows on the front of the house were in pretty bad shape. They were all wood windows (in the Capitol Hill historic district, that's mandatory for homes like ours), but they had suffered the punishment of time -- they had about a thousand layers of paint on them, they were pretty warped in the frames, the decrepit hardware varied from window to window, and a lot of the sash cords and balances just plain didn't work. Add to that the fact that they were all single-pane (and only a few of the panes were the original leaded glass, the rest having been replaced with more modern pressed glass over time), and thoughts of our heating and cooling bills made it pretty easy to justify starting to price out replacement windows. I talked to a few different companies serving the DC metro area, and settled on the folks at American Windows and Siding.

It took about five weeks for the windows to be made and delivered, and the installers came this past Wednesday. They did a great job, working like machines to get the old windows out and put the new ones into the existing frames. The new windows are double-hung and tilt into the room for easier cleaning (and painting!), and they're double-paned, with argon between layers of low-E glass, so that we don't hemorrhage money for heating and cooling. They come primed on the outside, so we now just have to prime the insides and then paint 'em all (more taping off, yay!), and we're entirely done with the major items on our pre-move-in checklist.

One other thing I like about the new windows: the indentations in the wood of the bottom sashes, used to open and close the windows. There's probably an economic motive for Weather Shield to do this rather than provide hardware on the windows themselves, but I quite like the look of the smoothly-rounded indentations. I wonder if they'll get dirty as all sin as we stick our grubby fingers in them; only time will tell!