Windows

My friend Ann was in town yesterday for a 24-hour house-hunting expedition, so I spent most of the day touring houses with her and Ingrid Wooten, a realtor who lives a few blocks from us. One of the houses was just around the corner from mine, and since I had just seen it on Sunday when they had an open house, I let them explore together while I walked over to see what was going on at my house. I was excited to see that our windows were being delivered.
These are Marvin Integrity windows, which have a wood interior and a fiberglass exterior and are infinitely more energy-efficient than our drafty old single-pane windows. The windows filled up our entire living room, but Rob said they should all be installed by this weekend.

I rejoined Ann and Ingrid at the house around the corner, and when they were done looking around, I suggested we take a quick tour of my house before we moved on. Both Ann and Ingrid have been following our renovation with great interest, so I didn't think it would be hard to convince them.

When we walked back over, we found Rob hard at work re-seeding our front lawn. I thought this might be a bit premature, since it was likely to get trampled over the next few months, but he had fenced the area off, so it just might work.
I didn't take many photos because I was busy showing Ann and Ingrid around and explaining some of the 'green' features. I realized later that this is the only shot that even shows Ann was here, and I only got her from the back.
Rob suggested we check out the big hole in the basement, which turned out to be the opening into the window well for our new egress windows. For those of you familiar with our basement, this is where the bathroom window used to be -- the new windows will be about 3 times the size of that one. That will let a lot more natural light into the basement!
Upstairs, John was working on the arched ceiling over the tub in the master bathroom. He seems happy here, but I just got a call from Rob asking me to come over and give John some direction on how we want it to look, as he seems to have hit a snag.
The window in the master bathroom will have an arched top to match the arched ceiling. Since it looks right out at the huge McMansion two doors down, it will have frosted glass on the lower half. (By the way, note the two rectangular windows on that house -- I'll get back to that later...)As we were leaving, I noticed that Rob had finished his lawn project. He scattered hay over the lawn to protect the seeds. I think we are supposed to get some rain over the next couple days, so we'll see how it goes...
As Ann and Ingrid and I were finishing up our tour of homes for sale, I suggested we show Ann the McMansion on my street, just for the heck of it. It's vacant and has been on the market for months (for $2.1 million), so it didn't require contacting anyone first. While Ann looked around, I took the opportunity to check out my house from a new perspective. This is what it looks like from the top (4th!) level of the house. You can see the tops of the solatubes in the kitchen and master bathroom, and that big opening is where the window will go for the master bath.
Later, when we were in the master bath of the other house, we realized you could see right through the windows above their tub into the window above mine! Yep, these are those two rectangular windows you can see in the previous photo looking out from my bathroom. Ann and I joked that if she bought this house, our husbands could moon each other from the bathroom every morning. Thank goodness we chose frosted glass!
After we got home, Dane called to say he was going to drop off some tile color samples for the roof. It turns out Attila the Roofer uses a different brand of the same kind of tile we had seen a sample of earlier, called Trimline, and it only comes in 6 colors, so it was pretty easy to pick the one we wanted (Desert Red). So, we finally decided on our roof! What a relief!

Well, now I have to wolf down some lunch and head over to the house. I'll try to report back later today.