Hi Charlene, Welcome home from your "trip"! Great story! I bet that honeymoon suite hasn't seen too many couples there with their kids! LOL And glad you're safely back home. I feel so sorry for all the people that are still at DIA---and probably will be for days yet! I'm a flight attendant and had been getting really down because I've been stuck down here on the ground for over a month now because I had surgery on my elbow, but when the blizzard started for real, I was so happy to be "stuck down here on the ground!" It's WAY better than having gotten stuck at the airport and winding up sleeping on the floor up in the domicile---which happened to a whole lot of people (not me) during the March blizzard of '03! Here's my Thornton blizzard story! Since I'm off I didn't need to worry about going out in it, so on Wednesday I just watched the people at DIA on TV all day. Then late afternoon I went out to try to shovel the 12" of snow off my sidewalk thinking (mistakenly) that it would make it easier to shovel the next day. Since I'm not supposed to be lifting anymore than 1 lb. with my left hand, I shoveled it 95% using just my right hand. Never knew you could do that, but you can! Except---one time when I got the shovel full and bent over to pick it up to empty it, I got too much "twist" in it and did something BAD to my back, so I decided to go in the house for a little bit to rest, but when I tried to take a step it hurt too much so I just stood there till it felt a little bit better--and I could move again--and started shoveling again. On Thursday I discovered that blizzards are no respecters of shoveled sidewalks, and when the snow finally stopped around noon, there was 14-16" of snow on my "shoveled" sidewalk, so I put on my eskimo suit and went back out to do it again. My back and the muscles in my right arm were so sore from the day before, that I decided whether I was supposed to or not, I was going to have to use my left arm. The city requires that walks be shoveled within 24 hours, so I was planning to shovel a one shovel wide path down the walk---and that was all. Right after I started, the neighbor across the street who was shoveling his drive started talking to me, and I mentioned that I had had surgery and wasn't supposed to be using my arm---and he went in and got his BIG 15 year old son out and told him to shovel the walk for me. He had it finished in less than 10 minutes---it would have taken me at least an hour like it had the day before! The neighbor asked if I needed the (hip deep) snow on the driveway shoveled, and I told him I didn't--that I didn't need to leave for a week and was just going to wait for the sun to melt it off---this is Denver, after all, and my driveway faces south! Then, early this afternoon I was at my kitchen window--which faces the front of the house--when I noticed that the snow on top of my roses didn't look "smooth" anymore. I can't see my drive very well from inside the house, but I went in the living room where I can see part of it, and the whole drive had been shoveled! I couldn't believe it--and started to cry! I waited until I was sure they were home this evening and went over to verify that it was them---they have two BIG teen boys--and to thank them--and started to cry again! It was so-o nice of them, and was the nicest Christmas present anyone could have given me. It means so much when someone does you a random act of kindness! This summer I'm going to take them some perennials and some produce from my garden. I can hardly wait! I'm sorry you didn't get to Mazatlan, but it's great that you were able to have a fun time anyway. I hope you are able to get your trip refunded--I know United is offering full refunds to anyone who had their flite cancelled. Merry Christmas, Skybird/Dee

Thanks for the tips everybody. I am convinced I want to keep them. I am still working on hubby. Worthy, our view of Lake Ontario is significantly LESS pristine than that, lol. ;) And yes, we do have a door off the kitchen onto the back porch. Hubby just thinks it will let in a lot of light with garden doors in the dining room. All I foresee is cold draft, my little windows gone, and a pile of shoes by the door lol. CP, unfortunately, in the dining room off to the left of the pic I posted above, the windows are already white vinyl. Replaced by the moron previous owner who wanted to sell the house. The old ones apparently were in abominable shape. But they replaced them with single pane, no argon, cheapest crappiest windows available. All for looks "Hey it has new windows in here". We had a window guy by and he claimed they were the worst he'd seen. Plus, they are ugly. Working on getting hubby to leave the windows in the LR!!!!!

What a lovely window you have. And the trim on your eaves suggests a really great old house. I'm not able to give any advice to you, but I can understand why you'd want to keep those outstanding arched storm windows. Making new ones would be very expensive. How many windows are there? Would you need to do all of them or just the ones on the upper reaches of your house? How heavy are they? All about the same? How do you lower them down to the ground? Do you have room inside the storm window to attach a retainer to keep it from falling when the latches are released? My word, it would be an accident waiting to happen to carry such a window down a 30 foot ladder! How wide or high an opening do you have when your regular windows are open? Would that dimension be adequate to bring the storm window through it? I'm not sure if I understand what Bulldinkie said, but I should hope something could help solve the problem. Good luck. I understand your concern about mobility issues.

Yes, we did. It took a year of haunting CraigsList and the local junkyards/salvage places to collect all the supplies, then a few months of rehabbing the old sash we found. I just installed them a month ago, in the nick of time for a cold winter here in the Northeast. I was lucky in that the replacement folks left the original frames intact; they just pulled out the sash, pulleys and weights, but the jamb still had the pulley cutout. Once I found the right sized pulleys it was just a matter of reinstalling everything, shaving the sash to fit, weatherstripping, etc. Ha. "Just" a matter of that. But it's absolutely worth it. The new and weatherstripped old wooden sash, even without storms, are just as airtight as those cheap vinyls were. They were awful: poorly sealed, breaking and bowing, half of them wouldn't even open any more - of course, had they been a nicer high-cost version, perhaps we wouldn't have been motivated in the first place. But are vinyls ever nicer, high-cost versions... ? ;-) If folks are seriously that interested in the project, I'm happy to post a few pictures.