How in the world, Part 1 - The Door

As I alluded to yesterday, this past weekend became a completely unexpected whirlwind of home renovation projects that will take me three full posts to chronicle.  I decided to start with the simplest and - no surprisingly - most expensive of the projects; our front door.

A few months ago one of the storm panels to the right sidelight of our door fell out. 

 I have no idea how it happened, but it was a somewhat major catastrophe - there was glass everywhere.  We more or less ignored it for the entire summer since it didn't seem like a huge deal, and mentioned the fact that we would need to get a new sooner or later.  But then all of sudden the temperatures dropped into the 20's overnight and it was obvious that major heat was being lost. 

On Saturday before leaving for Home Depot I mentioned the fact that we should start thinking about either replacing the storm window or the entire door.  The door itself was sort of horrible anyway - the handle didn't really work, it was hard to open, the screen door didn't swing shut ever, and in the winter the door would let in so much cold air near the floor that ice actually formed inside the house.  So, new door it is. 

But of course this was a crazy day and DH was in a crazy mood, so after talking to the door guy and getting some price estimates, we walked away with books in hand to look through to see what we liked and not three minutes later we were back at the door desk placing an order and setting up an appointment to have someone come and measure. 

Seriously, how in the world!??!?!

So, $2365 or so later, I realized we're apparently getting a new door.  Great!  I think.... The downside is that this door is costing us over half of our savings, which I really hoped would go towards a new kitchen, which we desperately need.  But that is apparently not to be.

Within the next month or so, our front door is going to go from looking like this:

To looking like this:

Should be nice, right?  Hopefully $2365 worth of nice.  And that thing had better not let in a lick of cold air.

And the craziest thing of all? This is only a tiny part of the craziness that was Sunday, November 7th.... Part 2 and 3 coming soon!