"Don't do that!"

That's what my dad told me when I asked him for advice while he was here. See, this past spring I put a bay window in my house on the south side. When we (Dave Dugas and Robert Melanson helped me, thanks guys!) put the window in and secured it to the king studs, it never occurred to me that I should have put some kind of spacing in so the window didn't stick to far inside the house. We were working on the outside of the house and were mostly concerned with getting the window in and not having it fall back out on the three of us. And making it look nice, of course.

As far as I can remember, none of us had ever put in a bay window before. Oh, I have done LOTS of regular windows of all different kinds, and Robert is now more experienced with vinyl as well having replaced a bunch of his own this past summer. So we had no real clue about what might make a bay window different from a regular window. I mean, both types of windows have to have a reinforced header to hold up whatever weight is above it and a level sill to sit the window on. Those are the most important parts, right? So we got it in, and later that week I framed a skirt around the bottom, insulated of course, and a roof stub to keep the rain off I sealed it all up nice and tight, and on the outside it does indeed look neat and trim.

Later this past summer I framed in and set the other bay window, on the north side of the house. This is the window I was fooling with when I decided to fan and chip my elbow bones, which is a story I think I would prefer to forget. I also helped Robert with some regular windows, my friend Nick with his basement (where we framed around some windows), Kieran with some work on his new house (which included new windows), test tutoring with my other friend Liz (and the tests ran on windows
But eventually my wife reminded me that I had started a project in April and here it was about July/August and I hadn't done the inside finish work. When 1 went to patch up the drywall, I noticed the window stuck through the wall about a quarter inch too much. Whoops! But I got busy again with other things, so forgot about it.

Which brings me up to last week. After another teasing from my wife that this project that started in April might take until March to finish, I decided to get myself in gear and make it pretty for her. My dad happened to be here, so I showed him what I was doing and what the problem was. Now, in his own day my dad has built dozens of houses and set hundreds if not thousands of windows, so I looked forward to what he might say. Sure enough, he told me he knew what to do. Thus the statement above! Eventually he did give me some ideas how to deal with the consequences of what I had done, and some weren't pretty, but they would make the window look great in the end. He did stress, however, that next time, just don't do that! Then it won't be a problem.

You might wonder how this applies to us, and I'll tell ya. Sometimes it's that simple. Oh, we might have made a mess of our lives, finding ourselves wallowing in sin and trying to get out. And we might get some advice from someone with experience, who will chart out for us a way to deal with the consequences of our actions. They may not be pretty, and we might think the cure is worse than the disease. Yanking sin out of our lives can hurt because the roots just hang on tight. In spite of that, once over it we might even end up stronger having lived through it. But when it comes to sin, the best advice is, well, don't do that!!!

Randy