Functional, restored wood windows...

Crazy week of travel this has been for me. But at least today, after landing at O'Hare at 3am last night and finally getting to bed at 4am, I woke up to the Chicago Bungalow's best friend, Just Sashes. :) You may have seen John and/or his son on other bungalow blogs restoring windows. He's very knowledgable about these wonderful houses--I believe he said he has one himself...and he was telling us all about the woodwork and window work and such. He knows his stuff, that's for sure. Let me tell you, for the money (in other words, to replace the windows entirely), John's firm is worth its weight in gold if you're looking to restore your windows.

Instead of replacing 5 windows with vinyl replacements at a cost nearing $3,000, we were able to have Just Sashes restore all 11 vintage windows in the house for significantly less. So now we can open the front windows and actually use them! That's awesome. And, of course, now our house is safer too, since this:

Has been replaced by these:So, we're happy about that...maybe tomorrow I will pull out the window air conditioners and see if they're working and which we could put in the dining room and/or 1st floor office. Also, we can clean out the attic crawl while we're up there. For once, we don't have much to do on a Saturday, which is amazing.

John also pointed out that our two bedroom windowsills are quartersawn oak. He says that's funny, because probably when they built the house, some dumb kid just threw it in for the carpenter, but obviously, quartersawn oak is a really expensive wood (in comparison). Here's a pic of the windowsill in the 1st floor office. I knew what quartersawn oak was, but I didn't realize these two sills were quartersawn oak. :)

Well, now it's on to bigger, better things...since Gina is pregnant--I didn't announce that here, I guess...well, Gina's pregnant--we're going to have to fix the upstairs bathroom toilet...which means having to spend money on the low-water pressure problem before anticipated. Then, if that doesn't fix the toilet, we'll have to replace the toilet. But I want to try the water pressure issue first. And go from there...have a good weekend, everyone!