I bought us more time

This won't look like much, I'm sure. Just a couple of open windows, right? But they didn't always open.

The woman we bought this house from renovated the kitchen, living room and dining room. As part of that big remodeling project, she put in new windows everywhere except the bedrooms. So all but eight of our windows are quite good and work beautifully.

The ones in the bedrooms are in decent shape,  as good as you could hope for with windows that are 57 years old. The storms, however, are a very different story. They are aluminum and have gotten grimed up in the grooves and in the latches that let you open and move the screens and panes of glass. We'd originally thought about replacing those windows but unfortunately we needed to get some expensive foundation work done, and as seems to be always the case for us, we have to replace the HVAC this fall. Those are/were necessities, not nice to haves.

It's important to me to have working windows. I love fresh air and I don't like running the AC when the weather is lovely. But our windows were so horrible that Kent actually threw his back out trying to get one of them open. I Googled "how to maintain aluminum storm windows" and found a great article that spelled out what I needed to do.

It turns out that WD-40 makes a silicone spray that unsticks those storm windows in a jiffy. OK, it takes a little longer than that but after about two and a half hours of work yesterday, I got all but one window opening and closing easily again. The lone holdout looks to be stuck shut because of paint; I can't even get the window open to get to the storms.

I'll take the seven windows that work. Now we'll be able to enjoy the cooler breezes with our windows open, and once winter arrives? We can put down the storm windows. I'd say we can live with these windows for a couple of more years.