Michael & Liz are Bloggable

Here is a little timeline of the first 3 minutes of owning our house back in March 2007:

minute 1: YAY We have a house!
minute 2: We should paint the kitchen.
minute 3: Wow, that sliding glass door sucks.

And then more minutes passed as we ignored that fact until about February of this year. We always hated the old blinds that we had to pull over in front of the door. We hated that the door didn't lock. We really loved that it let air into the house and we could actually see the blinds rustle as the wind blew outside... no wait, we hated that too. The top part of the blinds were held up by tape... FOR 3 YEARS. It's sad when an element of your house requires tape in order to function. I gotta give it credit though, bravo tape, you did good. There's really nothing about the old door that was good, it was all very very bad. So in February we finally went to Lowe's and got a new sliding glass door.

Here's the old one with no redeeming qualities (it didn't even slide smooth, it took effort):



The old door is made out of aluminum. According to the Lowe's installation guy, aluminum sliding glass doors are terrible and are always being replaced. The new door is made out of vinyl.

When going to Lowe's Liz and I had basically two negotiated specifications. I wanted a sliding glass door still (as opposed to french doors) so that we could have a screen for the nice cool Spring and Fall months. Liz wanted blinds in the glass so we wouldn't have blinds in the kitchen. I also really cared about the energy efficiency of the new door, so we got the most efficient door we could find within the realm of our specifications. Apparently the MOST efficient doors do not have blinds in the glass, but we wanted blinds. Here is what we came home with:



The last picture there makes it look like with the blinds down, it still lets the sun in. It looks that way just because the sun is up in the air and the blinds are turned down. If we turned the blinds up in the other direction, it'll block the sun completely.

I am very anxious to find out how this affects our cooling bill in the Summer and the heating bill next Winter. It has to do something. We already have the air off in our house now because it's so warm out, so we'll have to wait to see the monetary results.

So far we love the new door and I will never get tired of the slidey-ness... it's so smooth.