When should you get your Windows Replaced?

The question of when you should get your windows replaced was recently answered at our place. We know that you, the reader, are probably more interested in cooking pizza and roasting mackerel, but there is a certain portion of the public that cares about this.

There is a certain other portion of the public, namely some past guests, that were wondering when we were going to get around to this project. Part of Bed and Breakfast Life is that your maintenance work needs to get done.

Well, here is the short answer:

You should get your windows replaced when the old ones are intolerable. As windows age, their paint peels, they are sticky to open and close, and the allow moisture and dust to enter the living space. They also leak air, and an economic argument can be made that window replacement can result in a decreased energy cost.

Back Story: Window Replacement

If you care to go back through 3 years worth of blog posts, you will find out that we did a lot of work to retrofit an old garage into guest rooms. The story of this project is movie-worthy in that it had heroes, villains, forces of nature, and unexpected twists. A lot of this was done ourselves, due to idiot contractor trauma.

We have pretty much lived it down.

To the extent we can tell, the original building was built back in the 70’s, and we recently heard that it was once used to house a classic car collection.

We’re not going to go into detail on some of the construction practices. Do you know the difference between a good contractor a bad one? If you are interested in hiring a contractor, and he spends most of his time criticizing the work of the previous guy, he himself lacks understanding. We have learned not to whine about the previous builder. Better just to fix it.

This goes double for the windows. They were 50 years old and it was time 5 years ago.

When Not To Get Your Windows Replaced

During a global pandemic. We ordered them in October, and they were installed this week, meaning they took 5 months for the Window Fairy to lay them, hatch them, and raise them into little windows.

As we all know, it is not the easiest thing in the world to hire a contractor. We have the further problem of needing to keep the productive capacity of these rooms going.

When To Get Your Windows Replaced

Just before super-inflation. I don’t even want to think of what it will cost in five more years.

Seriously, they were keeping out the elements, but the varnish was peeling off, they were dropping chips on the floor, and it was getting to be a customer annoyance issue.

We apologize to anybody who stayed in this room and hated these windows. So did we. But, if it makes you feel better, we did something about them.

What it Costs to Replace your Windows

If you go down to the famous Big Box Hardware Store and buy them, the windows themselves cost somewhere between $150 and $175 each for the thrifty ones. If we ever need to do it again, we might think of some super insulated type that is cootie resistant. But, for the time being, we needed to make a business decision and this was it.

Labor costs: This was the difference between $175 and about $500 per window. Rhetorical question: How long would it take someone that is not experienced to replace a window? You have to bust out the old one, including remove the trim. A mess will result. You have to put the new one in in such a way that it doesn’t fall out comically on you like one of those episodes of Funny Home Videos. There is hauling. You have to haul the old ones away. Then you have to put it all back together in some way that makes you happy.

We’ve stopped being afraid of DIY jobs but we’ve evolved to the point that we can make a business decision. If this building is unproductive for a week, there is a cost associated with that.

A Word about Standardization

Something happened between 1940 and about 1975 with regard to standardization. The windows on the “old house” are literally of a type that they don’t make anymore. We had a few broken panes at one point, and we needed to replace them, and we called 3 contractors who literally told us that they didn’t know how to replace a window pane.

In this time frame if the window breaks, they replace the whole unit. It’s because in the new construction, the windows are standardized. It’s much cheaper to do it that way, because of labor costs. We did have the knowledge to replace a window pane on that old house and we did so, and it took a couple of hours and $10 for the glass and a little glazier’s putty (which, by the way, still exists).

So we’re basically living in a world that is so standardized, it’s practically impossible for the contractors in the current era to fix the stuff of the past.

When we were in the town of Buckhead, we admired the stained glass on the big old church in that town, but we can see that in order to fix it, it would cost an arm and a leg, and the solution for the time being from their point of view was to cover them with plexiglass.

Here’s a link to that post:

The Firefly–The Buckhead Lifestyle

How many of the old buildings uptown have had their windows bricked in?

At this point it takes a contractor, or to be more precise, a low wage contractor assistant who knows how to do nothing but change out a window unit. An “artisan” who can restore a window unit seems to be much more rare.

What it takes to get your windows replaced.

Money. We paid the local hardware store to install them, and they send a contractor over. They did the whole job in one day, they look pretty good and they do the intended job of not making us crazy.

We did get several quotes from “independent window replacement people.” Aside from not trusting them, they came to about the same costwise. The game here is to try to upcharge us to some sort of “deluxe” windows, which cost them no more to replace, but costs the buyer more, so it is an “upsell.”

Plus we know who to sue if there is a problem.

Link to Famous Hardware Store

The Economics

There was a crew of three guys who showed up from Marietta. They don’t work if it rains, so they don’t work every day. We know what laborers make. It took them a day. They have a trailer, and a big truck and they drove 70 miles each way, and that costs something.

There is a sales guy, who gets a commission. Wendy, the scheduling person, wants to run a B&B. There is a boss in there somewhere, who has a lot of problems. He is stressed because it is hard to hire low-wage workers that will show up. It is him that the hardware store will sue. He needs insurance and has to pay employment tax and a lot of other things. If there is an office he has to pay rent. He has a mortgage and taxes. We don’t want to be him.

So, we’re ready to say that the price they charged was “fair”. And, the business decision from our point of view is a no brainer. We have guests this weekend that we would have had to turn away.

Plus they will like the windows.

For those who are not good at math, here are the economics of the job.

Keeping in mind that the contractor has overhead, insurance, taxes and stuff, did anybody get exploited on this? Well the argument can be made that the labor force did, as we discussed the other day.

Also keep in mind that the hardware store has its overhead, and is giving us a “guarantee” so they know that some fraction of the time they are going to have to back it up. That’s why we went with the hardware store.

When should you get your Windows Replaced?

So the bottom line on this is:

You should get your windows replaced when you can.

At the present time, this market is such that no one got exploited. Aside, that is, from the six month wait, which was of course because of supply chain issues.

We’ve evolved to the point where we can be magnanimous and appreciate human effort. The weak link in this is the low wage workers that did the installation. Maybe they deserved a little more love from the system. As we know the whole system depends on them. And Wendy, of course.

We also know that there is not much money that could have been saved in this system, without cutting corners. That being the case, the business decision was to hire someone that is easy to sue.

And, we like the windows. So the system works.

If we were to do it over again, we’d do the same thing. Mid-grade, buy from the store, have a store installer do it, and not screw around. But we had to evolve to be able to do that.

That is what it is right now.