House with a sense of humor

I'm on vacation this week. And Ken will be too, after about Tuesday. So we're spending the week: a) hosting Thanksgiving for great friends and b) doing house projects. My idea of a great vacation.

One item Ken's had on his to-do list for a couple of years is to figure out what to do about storm windows. Last year, he made a prototype of an interior storm with someone's old exterior storm - but it wasn't entirely satisfactory and we don't have enough of them. So, based on this great idea, he built a prototype plastic internal storm this weekend - then we tweaked the design and built about 5 more. They are working AWESOME - they keep out the cold air that bled in through little un-weatherproofable spots like the sash pulleys. I think we have about, oh, 20 more to go - but we're in assembly-line mode now, so they should go quick. Thanks to some cull lumber, we think they only are costing about $9/window on average, which is about as low as we could hope. Especially when custom interior storms range $100-$250 and up per window.

Photos of his whole system later. But...

This morning, as I was measuring the next set of window openings, I closed the lids to the window seat and found this silly surprise:

Yes, that's a fuzzy pillow stuck to the window pane because condensation inside had turned to frost. We've never seen this before, but I suspect that keeping the lids against the window (with pillows shoved between) essentially insulated OUT that small space. Hee, hee. Later on, there was a little 'thud' as the pillow fell off. So, I guess we'll attack those windows with storms later tonight!

Speaking of silly, here's the latest from the upstairs guest room. I finished getting all the wallpaper off while Ken was ironing out the details of the storms, and scrubbed all the glue residue off the walls, finishing this morning. So, the room is ready for plaster repair, then we can finally cover up the ridiculous color scheme. That day can't come soon enough.

Final cruel joke: one wall (thankfully, only one small one) is made of old drywall of some sort, painted, then 2 coats of wallpaper. I made a huge mess of it stripping the paper, but we had already decided we'd better skimcoat it with our fake plaster trick, so joke's on you, wall!