Adjusting the living room windows

Our living room windows weren't quite the right height. We have 9 foot ceilings and the standard height windows we installed were a bit too high off the floor. Basically, when you sat down you couldn't see outside. 

View-blocking windows

We probably would have just lived with this but my Dad decided to build a small addition onto his house and he needed a couple of windows. So instead of buying brand new ones - he bought ours for half price! Woot! And we applied that to new, taller windows.

Demolition on a brand new house. Sigh.

 Here is a good comparison photo - the new window is over a foot taller.

Chris and Cooper providing scale

 And here are the wonderful new windows fully installed. Much better!

I can see!

The planets really aligned for this one. We never would have shelled out the bucks for different windows if Dad hadn't been doing his place; we probably wouldn't have done it if the interior trim work had been finished; and we certainly wouldn't have done the demolition if the siding had been in place already. But I'm so very glad we did.

Unusually cold

So, it was 43 degrees when I got up this morning. Now, I realize that I live in upstate NY and that we get cold weather - but 43 in September??? Seems a bit cruel.

Fortunately we got all of our firewood split and stacked! Yes, that is correct - a total of 162 feet of wood has been put up for the winter. We didn't bother calculating cords since the racks we use on our porch are 10 feet long. We just fill them up and keep track of how many we use. That gave us an estimate of how much wood we wanted to put up for this coming winter and we decided to do half again extra so that we'd have carry over into next year.

Basically, we planned for 150 feet, 4 feet high and we ended up with 162 feet. Not too shabby. We'll track it again this winter to confirm consumption levels and plan for next year's usage. It's a really good feeling to look out and see all that wood banked. And we've already used a bit of it with these cold temperatures.