Week one, done.

We made it.  After all the dreaming and scheming, planning, packing and moving, we live in Hillsborough.  Just to make sure our first week here was interesting, Meg, the world’s laziest dog, pushed the limits of irony by tearing her ACL.  To ratchet the tension up another notch, Jacques (dog two), convulsed himself awake with a seizure on Thursday morning.  Everyone is doing fine, except perhaps for the people.  Oy.

Between unpacking and cleaning, I’ve done a few things that qualify as home-improvement this week.  Waking up on this rainy Sunday morning, I was curious why all the storm windows seemed to be leaking at the meeting rail.  Water, as you know, is a building’s worst enemy.  It’s an insidious foe, flowing relentlessly downward until: a) it gets to an ocean, or b) something else stops it.  If that something else happens to be your home, sooner or later you’ll have problems.

After a quick examination, it turned out that EVERY storm window in the entire house had the outermost storm panel set at the bottom of the window.  Which means that all the rain that hit the top panel flowed behind the lower panel.  Which resulted in pools of water on the window sills whenever it rained hard.  Fortunately, there are about 278 layers of paint on those sills, so they don’t seem to have rotted at all, but they were filthy.  Really filthy:

So today, I wandered around with the vacuum and some Lysol wipes and paper towels, reversed the storm window panels so that they actually shed water, and scrubbed all the window sills clean.  It wasn’t glamorous work, but it was fundamental and easy and I’ll rest better knowing that my window sills aren’t collecting puddles of water every time it rains.  And they look better, too: