Until now, I’ve tried not to show you the ugly parts of my house.

But the gloves are coming off today, folks, and you’re gonna get to see my least favorite feature of our house in its full glory.  Ready?

{ Yep, that’s the chair I pimped last week. And a cute cat. }

Those are the windows in my husband’s office.  They are ugly, and they are not limited to this room – the fugly windows are all along the front of the house (4 rooms) and they get even worse around the side and back of the house.  {Disclaimer: I actually do really love my house, the windows just make me twitch.}

Don’t believe me?  Check it out.

And this is the look we’re rockin’ from the outside:

I can tell that you’re jealous.

Even though it’s pretty obvious, here’s a rundown of why I hate these windows:

1. They have burglar bars on them.  Ugly and unsafe in the event of fire – what a winning combo.  {Although part of me actually does like the decorative iron ones on the front of the house…}

2. The windows in the front are tall and skinny {and not in a fashion model kind of way}.  My mom calls them arrow slits.  Nice, huh?

3. The windows along the side and back are that old 60s style where they’re long from side to side and float above the floor.  I can live with it, but I never would have picked’em.

4. The windows don’t have any trim on the interior, so they’re pretty naked {think bare drywall}.

5. They are as old as dirt, so the energy efficiency is practically zero.  I have windows on 2 sides in my office and it’s pretty much unpleasant year round.

6. The aluminum frames are ugly.

7. The lack of trim means that the window sensors for our alarm are just hangin’ out there.

There are probably other reasons why I hate them, but I just can’t think of any right now.

So, what do I do about these wonky windows?  That’s what I’ve been deliberating since we bought the house over a year ago, and I still haven’t come to a solution that I’m totally happy with.

These are what I see as my options:

1. Remove the burglar bars, finally give the windows a good cleaning {they’re pretty gross on the outside because of the bars}, and live with them.

2. Same as above, but add trim on the inside of the house.  The only problem is that the window ledge on the bottom of the windows doesn’t extend very far – that means I either have to do extra skinny trim on the outside  of the window or replace the window ledge, and neither option sounds that awesome to me.

3. Same as #1 {and maybe #2}, but also paint the aluminum frame on the exterior a deep black color.  Even though I don’t like the bars, I do like the contrast that the black bars provide against our lighter-toned brick, and I think I’ll really miss that contrast once the bars are gone.  {I could also paint the aluminum white on the inside to spruce it up a bit and match the trim.}

4. Replace the old windows with new ones.  The obvious con is the expense, but it would be nice to save on energy bills and have some non-offensive windows.

5. Same as #4, but change the windows along the front of the house from sets of 3 windows in each room to a large, single window in each room.  Or maybe 2 larger windows?  The obvious problems with that are that brick work would be involved (expensive) and I’m not really sure how the bigger windows would look in the end.  Here is what is quite possibly the world’s worst mock-up of what that might look like:

Okay, that’s terrible – please forgive me for posting that mock-up.

Anyway, that’s where we are right now – pondering and not making any decisions about the windows.  Got anything going on with your house that you just can’t figure out what to do?  I can’t promise we’ll be any help, but I know we’d like to hear about it!