Crank That

I swear we love our house, but it seems like every dang time we turn around there is something breaking or being broken.

As you know, our 1960’s brick ranch was purchased knowing that we would have a lot of work to do….old HVAC system, old electrical system, old roof, and old windows, just to name a few. And I just thought that the original crank windows were ‘just so cool’ when we moved in…in the summer…when most of them were in working order. For those of you who may not be familiar with crank windows, basically you turn a handle and the horizontal panes of the window flag open and shut.

Right as the weather was beginning to turn cold, the crank on our bedroom window broke. It was my fault, I’ll admit it. My dogs were digging in the backyard (which if you have seen our backyard – you would totally NOT understand why I even gave a crap) and I hurriedly cranked open the window to yell at them to stop. They stopped and I cranked the window shut. Then they started it up again, and I hurriedly cranked the window open again…well, that was apparently the crank's last crank. I go to crank the window shut again and it doesn’t do anything. What do I do? Impatient Stacy reaches her hand out and just pulls the window panes back in, losing whatever kind of resistance was left in the panes. After that they just flapped in the wind. And this is more than just an annoyance and a heating/cooling issue – we are talking safety here folks. S-town is safe, but let’s just face it that ‘up and coming’ areas sometimes means people ‘up and coming’ into your home when you aren’t there.

But as I mentioned, I did this in the morning. I, being perpetually late, didn’t have time to mess with it and just went on my way to work. Shane had to leave early too, so the window was left flapping all day. That night, Shane had a work dinner, so I go outside to try to screw the window shut (which is what a window repair company recommend that I do…after he told me he would charge me $400 to replace the window), and that didn’t work. That night…window still flapping. That’s why we got big dogs, isn’t it? Finally, the next day Shane screwed the window shut, and it is still that way today.

We seriously do need to get the windows replaced. You can stand a foot away from them and feel the cold air coming in…not to mention our $220 gas bills for the past two months. We got the first bill, freaked out, and lowered the temp to 68. Got the second bill and realized that that saved us a whopping $2. What SHALL we do with our savings?