DIY

Clockwise: Pickles, forged candle holder,
museli, ceramic candle holder, knife,
bar of soap, mini-paperweight, blown glass.
New windows in the background.

Pickles.  Hats.  Knives.  Bowls.  Soap.  Glassware.  Bread.  Butter (once.)  Bikes.  Cheese.  Yogurt.  Candle holders.  Beer.  Peanut Butter.  Lots and lots of peanut butter.  These are some of the things we make for ourselves and dear ones.  And the food we eat at home is 99% scratch.  (I often use bullion cubes, vinegars and chocolate chips.)

Safe to say we have a bit of the "do it yourself" bug.  A big part of this is passion.  Passion for extremely awesome and healthy things.  And enthusiasm for figuring stuff out because seeing what we can make ourselves is downright magical at times.  And, to be honest, there is a bit of a control issue underneath it all.  We both get incredibly impatient and frustrated with expensive crap that should be better.

Now, not everything we make actually turns out to be "awesome" in a universally understood sense of the word.  Some of my pottery is pretty neat but none of it is going to be flying off the Etsy shelves anytime soon. One year we had a pretty disappointing batch of pickles.  Our stemless wine glasses do hold liquid... and look like the creation from a summer camp craft project by your favorite 7-year-old niece who has a bright future in medicine or law or athletics.

When we moved into our new house this summer it had recently been completely, gutted, remodeled and thoroughly updated.  Despite our DIY inclinations, with full time jobs and existing extracurricular activities we were A-OK with this.

The one project left needing attention was the windows.  Several of the windows in back and other less visible spots had already been replaced with highly efficient, but charmless, vinyl.  The large and characteristic windows had been repainted shut.  As we looked into new windows we wanted to keep the look and feel of the classic windows and found a local carpenter who could do modern and efficient custom wood windows.  And they were beautiful.

But windows are already pretty pricey and the cost of the custom wood windows was about double.  But they were so much nicer.  So with an extremely skilled Christopher in one hand and a double shot of DIY we went with the wood windows and made up the cost by installing them ourselves.

And that was what we did for fun in September.  I won't try to recount the hours (and hours and hours) or all steps but will share some of my fragmented impressions.

• We had 12 windows.
• We spent a lot of timing priming and painting the windows.  One evening in particular was spent priming and painting in the driveway.  It was not hot or particularly dry (I think there was mist) and it took forever for coats to dry.  I had a hair dryer blowing on the windows for many hours, was up way to late, had work in the morning and still screwed up the paint when we finally did move them.  We actually slept that night with no windows of any sort installed in the side of our house.  Friends asked if we were afraid of "predators" but we were too tired to care.
• We had no locks on the windows for several days as we first didn't have any latches or locks and then had the wrong ones.
• The inside of our house was coated in a thick layer of wood dust from the sanding and scraping that had to be done for all the windows and sills and more.  It was everywhere.  For a month.  
• I spent thousands of hours (or what felt like thousands of hours) removing tape and scraping paint, retouching the paint, re-scraping, retouching, re-scraping, retouching and so on in a sisyphean cycle of despair.  There is still paint and little bits of tape on some of the windows. 
• There was a typhoon in the middle of this project.  Truly.

But despite my bellyaching the windows are wonderful.  They look like the original 95-year-old windows we removed but actually open.  They keep the cold out, heat in, and make the house much quieter (which I wasn't expecting) and just cozier.  We did a fairly crappy job with the paint but they are still exceedingly charming.  And what we saved by doing it ourselves is worth a couple extra mortgage payments - something we literally were able to take to the bank - as well as the satisfaction of knowing we did it!