Broken window panes

My all time favorite Christmas song is "The Christmas Waltz".  If you don't know it by the title, it starts - Frosted window panes, candles gleaming inside, painted candy canes on the tree..  It's a wonderful, bright Christmas song that fills my little heart with joy everytime I hear it - but mostly when I hear Karen Carpenter sing it.

Anyway, that's not actually what this blog entry is about, that just explains the title.  The week before Thanksgiving, Jeff and I painted our living room.  We also wanted to paint the french doors in the living room since they had never been painted before - not sure why the previous owners never painted the gray steel door to match the rest of the room, but whatever!

In the house I grew up in, we would pull the panes off of the french doors to clean the windows all the time.  I figured all french doors were made to have the panes removed periodically for cleaning since nobody should have to clean a full sized glass door one little square at a time.  So Jeff and I took the inner panes off and washed the doors and windows.  Unfortunately, we ran out of time to paint that night so we just left that task for the next day and headed to bed. 

In the wee hours of the morning we were abruptly awoken by a loud crashing noise.  I, of course, stayed in bed and sent Jeff to check it out.  He reported back saying, "I told you we shouldn't have taken the panes off the doors!".   Sure enough (and luckily on just one of the doors) the entirely glass section had fallen out of the door and was laying on our back deck.  To make matters worse, it was freezing and raining that night.  Luckily, the glass hadn't broken (still not sure how that happened).  So we picked up the glass section and put it back in the door but couldn't quite get it lined up perfectly.  Since it was 3 in the morning, we decided to secure it just enough so that it wouldn't fall out again and finish the job at a more reasonable hour. 

After work that day we went to finish our task.  One of the screws hit the glass just right as we were screwing it in a shattered the entire window.  Awesome!  Long story, not so short, we just got the door fixed last week and we will never remove the panes from a door again!  And no, we still haven't painted the door.