Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Through A Glass Darkly
The problem had been building up for a long time, but now I’m not sure that the solution is everything we’d hoped it would be. I guess it goes to show you, but somewhat less clearly than it might.
Things started well, way back in the ‘90s. We’d been in our apartment for several years already and it really felt like home. We liked the neighborhood, the floor plan, the spaciouness, and all sorts of little details and aspects - and, it bears emphasizing, we especially liked the view. In cities, “real” cities, one typically looks out on other buildings looking back at you. We, on the other hand, looked out to a westward view of a narrow but densely-planted greenbelt lined on the far side with a veritable forest of mature trees. Acacia, pine, euke and juniper tower over a thick border of shrubs and brush; a lawn that starts under the trees rolls right down to the sidewalk. Our windows slid open to admit plentiful breezes fresh off the pacific, and when the sun set, it bathed our living room in impossibly bright gilded rays. Big windows, big breezes, big green view. Of all the good things about our place, these ranked particularly high.
Within a few years, these pleasures began to suffer a diminution: a white residue began to grow between the double panes of our front window. In wet weather standing water formed there, spattering the inner surface with condensation that eventually dried to a filmy pale map. The front windows were beginning to remind me of a glass from which buttermilk had recently been drunk. It got so bad eventually that our lovely trees and blazing sunsets were just the stuff on the other side of the schmutz. Transparency had been irretrievably compromised.
We told the landlady; first, she blamed our dog. When it started happening to her windows too, though, she reassesed. She admitted that it was a structural problem, leaking from the roofline. Given the kind of maintenance our home typically received, I could believe it. Work would have to be done. When? Soon. Later, but soon.
Time passed, at a substantially predictable rate. The job was put off from spring to summer, and the windows grew ever more clouded. Winter passed, and spring came again. We hung streamers to mask the windowstains during Zachary’s birthday party, the party ended, the streamers came down, and the clarity of the windows continued its slow descent into opacity as condensation kept building, covering ever more of the window, covering it ever more thickly. We’d peer out and mourn our disappearing view, and wonder aloud when refenestration might be visited upon us.
The answer was, last October, when scaffolding went up. A few weeks later the stucco came down, revealing plentiful rot in both the lathe and the framing. It was going to be a big job, but at least it had begun.
It took a long time, by which I mean, now it’s March and the scaffolding just came down this past weekend. The new windows were installed two months into the process - back in late November. They’re nice windows, double paned, mullioned, and delightfully bereft of steamy, moldy evaporsation. Once again, we’ve got our view, our trees, our sunsets. Sort of.
In a reasonable-sounding-at-the-time effort to enhance privacy and maintain thermal integrity, the new windows have a reflective coating. From the outside, during the day, they’re mirrors onto the street, bouncing the blue sky and white clouds and green leafy trees to the eye of the passer-by. Of course, at night this effect is reversed, but I’m okay with that. Nothing going on here, ma’am. Move right along.
However, there is one unanticipated new issue to which we are having some trouble adjusting. We can see right through the windows, just as god and the glazier intended, but things look different. The coating on the glass has changed the color of the outside world, rendering everything dull and dark. The trees are greyer, the sky, less blue. Out our window, everyday looks like a foggy day, the sun seeming cloistered in clouds even when it’s really shining brightly out. The only hint we get of its brilliance is when it blazes full-force right into the living room as it descends daily to the horizon - and even then, its glory is constrained, diminished by the very windows through which I view it. Photons travel from the molten surface of a blazing star through 93 million miles of empty space, give or take, to reach me, only to be reflected and reduced a mere few feet before reaching my eyes and the surface of my skin. Denied.
We keep the living room lights on these days quite a bit more than we used to. I’ll crack a window - they crank open and we need to be careful of strong winds - to see how the outside world really looks; it’s always brighter and more colorful than it seems through the glass. The view out the window has always been one of our favorite things about our home. The view, I suppose, is the same, but the windows affording it have changed significantly, and not entirely to my satisfaction. I suppose it could be worse, but it used to be so much better.
Things are so rarely as they appear; I now live in architectural proof of that hypothesis. My house is wearing shades; life has been darkened. But the sun still shines a full spectrum of color when it shines on my street. I just need to make sure that I don’t forget, when I look out my front window, that I’m only seeing a fraction of the brilliance.
