"A plague of plastic windows on your house!"

These are the windows to my soul. (And that tells you all you need to know about my soul)

I'm going to tell you about my windows. No, don't you dare click away! Though perhaps you have been waiting on tenterhooks to hear what the latest developments are window-wise. And God, you'd be wrong not to. It's gripping stuff. A real old rollercoaster ride of upvc thrills and spills. Or, I could be making that up. In fact right at this very minute I am wondering why I started this blog post, but I've already uploaded all the photos, so we're just going to have to see it through together. Aren't we? You're still here right? You've not just flicked through the photos, paused momentarily to admire the orange and yellow gingham curtains in my bedroom, and moved off to some more promising blog title on the right? Good. Now stop looking at those curtains: they'll burn your eyes.

I moved to Berlin for the view.

Anyway, finally! Finally! I got to say goodbye to my 'heritage' windows. These windows have been the bane of my life for such a long time I can't even remember how long it's been. If you follow my every word and commit it to memory you might remember this post, where we explored the subject of language interpretation in relation to these windows. So since our landlord got a sniff that he might get a year or two's extra money if he stopped the damn things from falling into the street, he decided to bite the bullet and shower us with dust and upvc. I couldn't be happier. Well, I could, but we'll get to that. The plan was that they would be here for two days to do both the living room and the bedroom. I figured they would do one room one day, and another room the next, but to my surprise, they decided a better idea would be to take out ALL the windows on day 1. To think I was worried about it being drafty over winter?: I didn't much fancy sleeping in a windowless room overnight. 

"Tell Martha Stewart she's styled the room beautifully..."

The trouble was this window (above). We have a door out to a balcony on the left, and you can see a window on the right, and in case you missed it, we have a ginormous window slap bang in the middle. This is the window voted most likely to fall apart in a breeze and kill someone. It's big, isn't it? I think the thing is that you don't realise just how big the windows are because the ceilings are so high (though you can't even see just how high they are in this photo), and you don't really think about it until you start thinking of how nice it would be to replace those hiddy curtains with something nice that was actually attached to the top of the window *all* the way along. Then, even with IKEA prices, you begin to realise that you would actually rather use that money to have a holiday in the sun and just live with them.

So when the man came round and took all the measurements, he forgot to add a little note to the person making the window to say it might be hard to get a window this size up the stairs in one complete unit. There was talk of them attempting to take it apart, but thankfully they gave up. And so, I am stuck with it for another 2 weeks while they make it presumably in panels. The rest of the bedroom and living room windows went fine you'll no doubt be pleased to hear. The walls have taken a bit of a kicking, see below for an idea of the beautiful mess that has occurred.

My little hanging wooden hearts have also gone missing. Sniff...

 It's not a comfort to see them carrying out a pile of bricks which one can only assume previously were employed in holding together the front walls of the apartment. In fact, I am pretty sure if that gap-filling foam in a can stuff they use was an adequate replacement for bricks, there would be a lot more houses made out of it. Though what do I know, maybe there are. In fact as nearly everybody in this building has used this same company for their windows, there's a good chance that a significant portion of the front of the apartment block is made of foam. On the plus side, I am looking forward to moving back to Derby now that  I fear the front of the building collapsing. So that's nice.

And the little pig said: "Please man, sell me your shaving foam so that I can build a house".