Kitchen Crisis Averted(?)

Yesterday was Not a Good Day. That bit about the kitchen renovation going off the rails really threw me for a loop. As I talked things over with my contractor, my options seemed to be as follows:

  • Do nothing. Get the cabinets delivered, and keep them in my living room until the weather got warmer in the spring. This was (obviously) not an option I was willing to consider.
  • Go and buy some junky windows that sort of kind of fit the spaces we needed, have them installed, and then replace them with the real windows when we could. This was also not something I was at all fond of. For one thing, it would be costly to buy temporary windows and then pay to have them installed, uninstalled, and then have the right ones installed. For another, doing all that work around a freshly renovated kitchen was just asking for something else to go wrong. The company that screwed up our order was willing to “loan” us windows until the right ones came, but this wasn’t much better. For one thing, the windows they had available to loan, weren’t the right sizes. For another . . . no.
  • Cut the holes for the windows, but board them over until the right windows came in mid-December. Not a very good option. The kitchen would be like a cave, and my contractor wasn’t sure he’d be able to fit us in over the winter. We wouldn’t be able to finish the outside or inside of the kitchen, putting us in kitchen purgatory for the next who-knew-how long.

Yeah. None of those were viable options in my book, and no matter how much I scoured the interwebs, I couldn’t find windows that would work for us that could arrive before mid-November. That would be much less than optimal, and I wasn’t sure it would work for my contractor, and I’d still have these cabinets for all that time.

So I got more inventive with my searches. I searched local window companies. Local hardware stores. It didn’t matter where I looked: no windows were anywhere. Thanks a lot, COVID.

About ready to give up, I decided to do one last set of searches through Lowes and Home Depot, to see what windows they had available in stock right this second. Limiting my search to only that, Lowes only had really junky windows I wasn’t willing to buy. Home Depot . . . had something I’d missed. I had originally wanted to buy Andersen 400 casement windows. Two of them were 3 feet by 3 feet, and 1 one 4 feet by 3 feet. The one kind of Home Depot window that was available was: an Andersen 400 casement window that’s 3 feet by 2 feet 10 inches.

The exact sort of window I had originally wanted, only two inches thinner for two of my windows, and 14 inches thinner for my center window.

So it became a choice of get windows that are a bit smaller, and roll with the punches, or go back to kitchen purgatory.

Reader, I bought the windows.

This has pushed us back a bit. We’re now scheduled to start a week from Tuesday. But that’s still a ton better than what it was looking like yesterday. These days, we’ll go with that. Thanks for the well wishes in my hour of need.

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