window washing wonders

 In the month of August, in the infamous year 2020, we washed allllll the windows in our house.

We have 75 window panes in our house.  Jack reminds me that technically the window is the manufactured unit, which in our house as 1-3 different panes of glass, but when you're washing that distinction doesn't feel important.   So, we have 75 windows.  Don't forget to double that to get 150 surfaces, inside and out!

This is the first time we've made an effort to actually do all of them, although we've been in the house for four years now.   At first, life was too crazy, then the windows leaked and over the course of the four stints of repair work, the window guys cleaned them at the end of their work.   The saga of the leaky windows is one I haven't had the heart to detail here yet.  Other excuses for not washing them, include being pregnant and having 18 months of construction followed by 3-4 months of road paving and repaving happening across the street or mere inches from our house, which resulted in a discouraging amount of dust, and caused us to delay cleaning the outside of the windows.  

Lastly there is the question of how to go about washing windows in our tall house.   We designed the house with a lot of operable windows, to allow for washing, and for many windows it works well, but there are still a lot of awkward angles and obstacles.  We've acquired quite a bit of equipment now, including two 16' poles, a reverse squeegee that we had to piece together ourselves and even a window washing bucket, which was well worth the money compared to using a glass baking dish.  

The "reverse squeegee" or "push squeegee" is a product I am surprised doesn't exist.   Jack used it to squeegee the third floor windows while standing on the roof.  It worked reasonably well.

Someday I am going to actually get an estimate for paying someone to clean these windows, so we can feel really, really good about the effort it takes.  Also, as I knew when we designed the house, even if you pay to have them cleaned, there is no guarantee a bird won't poop on them the very next day.

The last obstacle, beyond the right gear and technique, is the timing.  We use hot water and vinegar and avoid direct light on the windows.  Of course you also don't want it to be raining when you swing the windows open wide.  Also, we don't really want Dd around because a lot of the windows are a bit scary and we don't normally open them for ventilation.  All this means that we cleaned the windows over the course of 6-7 sessions this month, and I washed some of the inside windows in the dark.  

In conclusion, I'm glad we did all of them relatively close together so that we know they've been done.  I think most of the time, we'll just wash the ones that are bothering us.  There's one more type of squeegee and pole I'd like to buy to make certain types of windows easier.  I'm curious to see how much better and faster we will get at this, as we go.