Bed Stuy Reno

Original Broken Window in Back Parlor (Held in Place with Screws)

Back Parlor Windows Installed

From the very first day of home ownership, G and I knew we there was at least one window we would need to replace in the house. The window glass in the back parlor that had been broken by one of the house’s tenants when the previous owner had run it as a more-or-less de facto SRO. Part of our agreement with the seller was that they had to fix the window. Instead, they simply swapped out the broken panel with another broken panel, held in place by screws. This rendered the window inoperable, and it would not fully close at the top. We took a credit at the closing for this and other issues (the usual stuff: basement flooded, ceiling fell to the floor, power cut by ConEd, house broken into, etc.)

So there was one window to be replaced that we knew of. Aesthetically, if it had been in our budget, we would have done a wholesale replacement of all the house’s windows, swapping out all the tired vinyl units with new insulated, low-E glass wood windows. But since we never found that stash of cash hidden in the house’s walls (which only half-jokingly reasoned might exist, since we had already found an actual stash of drugs during our demo phase), we could never afford a giant window project.

So we lived with that one less than perfect window for three years. But when it became clear that we were in fact moving to Philly, and that it was time to prepare the lower duplex for rental, we needed to deal with that window.

But why replace one window when you could replace the whole floor’s windows? They did need it. The parlor floor had the worst windows of the three levels, for whatever reason. Aside from the broken one, the other windows were either impossible to open, or once open wouldn’t stay open, wouldn’t lock properly, didn’t seem to insulate (certainly not from sound, and certainly not from noise), and were just pretty ratty and beat up on the whole.

I looked on the Bstoner forum and called around to get some prices. Wood windows were our ideal, but damn were they expensive. It was something like two wood windows were equal in price to six aluminum windows. Which I guess really equals one to three, but there’s no way to know for sure because the math is just too complicated.

We wound up getting aluminum windows with low-E, insulated glass from AirFlo Windows. All I can say about AirFlow is that they are a pain in the ass to deal with, but their product seems good. I was able to negotiate a per-window price that seemed more-or-less reasonable for what I was getting, but after I placed my order, they fell off the map. They had told me three weeks lead time from order to install which would have been fine, but later they changed their tune and explained that they had meant that at the end of three weeks, they could tell me when the install date would be. What? They were killing my schedule, and when I called them on it, they accused me of lying and harassment.

In the end, they showed up to install our windows on the same day that we had movers at our house loading up our furniture. Amazingly, everyone worked around each other amicably, and at the end of the day, the house was empty, and the new windows were in.

Front Parlor Windows Installed