Usually a hot topic when spring comes around. This makes sense with the crazy weather patterns we have been having! Spring, Summer, Winter, Fall, Right? Which season is it? Or is it Summer, Spring, Fall, Winter? Well, whatever season it is it must be Global Warming and we still have to figure out how to get the windows clean. So many viruses out, your "Windows" (you know the Microsoft kind) will crash at the drop of a mouse. Getting the grime off your windows can be almost as time consuming as removing the lint from your innie belly button, albeit not as interesting though! I admit that I would rather go after the lint then attack the grimelins from the window. It’s a pane in the posterior cheeks if you ask me, certainly not on the top of my cleaning checklist. However, if you don’t clean your windows along with your other spring cleaning it is almost as bad as if you forgot to vacuum. BTW that is a little trick I learned when I was a Minnie Me, you could make mom believe that you did all your cleaning if you just vacuumed. Note to self: check under the kids beds when I get home. The moral of the story is that your windows probably should not have that grimy multicolored look unless your dwelling is the Canterbury Cathedral. If you have a particularly grimy window covered in hard water spots, scale, and bug droppings then I have a story that might help.
A few weeks back a friend of mine called to tell me about the black widow infested vine forest thriving in the window wells to the basement of a house he had just moved into. It was truly amazing. Beautiful he said, with orange trumpet vines that had laid claim to the job of filtering out all light that would seek any type of refuge in the dark basement. Let me tell you HEPA don’t got noth’in on motivated trumpet vines in the filter business. As you can imagine in every forest there must be creatures. The king of each vine jungle had the biggest juiciest Black Widows you ever did see. These must have been Shelob's babies. There was no shortage of yummy little pill bugs, other spiders, crickets, and beetles in each window well to fulfill each fatherless widow’s dominatrix like hunger and desire. There might have even been a hobbit or two fighting to bring down the S&M ring of spider dominance. So you can imagine the state of each window well and pane recessed in the menacing forests. These windows had seen it all and more by look of the mummified crust that had adhered itself to the once pure and graceful glass.
My friend branded his trusty two handed Fiskars 9154 PowerGear 32-Inch Bypass Lopper and went to task of de-forestation. I told him he was encouraging Global Warming in removing all that foliage but he gave no heed. He was a man on a mission out to conquer the Holy Land. Leveled with Fern Gully like reminiscence dancing in the air he changed gears and tools bending his mind to the task of capture and interrogation. He really wanted to catch the mini Shelobs and keep them as pets, his precious. Thankfully he has a wife with enough sense to abhor the very idea of any eight legged enigma. Her response to his ludicrousity was Gandalf like, “YOU SHALL NOT KEEP.” So he did what any man would do and went looking for a magnifying glass and found instead a shiny new bottle of Ortho Home Defense MAX Insect Killer. It was effective. He succeeded in banishing the life out of the spider queens. I think I even heard their great great grand children cry out in the final moments. Now that the fun was done things took on a serious note as there were windows to be rescued. The Windex came out and the mummified crust was attacked with vim and vigor. All that it seemed to do was make the grime, water spots, and scaly build up look young and fresh. So it was decided that the scale and water spots should be attacked directly and the Lime Away was brought out and applied with a terry cloth. It sat for a while and the windows were rinsed with clean water. That should have had some effect but no it did not. This was getting serious. It was looking as if the windows had lost their will to fight and had allowed all the grime and scale to take over their very soul. Drastic measures were required. Now be warned that what I am about to tell you to use is not considered environmentally sound. Much prudence and caution must be exercised when pulling out the atomics. I told my friend that we better use the keys and dial the code that would “rewease the secwet weapon”. I gave him a bottle of The Works toilet bowl cleaner. This stuff is poison controls worst nightmare. The fumes, if accidentally inhaled, may cause schizophrenia. You must use rubber gloves and a possible face mask when using The Works. Think of it as the Frankenstein of chemicals. You must also apply it with much diligence and care. My friend used paper towels. He applied some of the liquid to the towel and wiped it across the surface so as not to create a chemical spill that would require a call to FEMA. The effect was immediate as if some dark necromancer magic was bringing the windows back from the dead. The mummified crust was literally disintegrated with an acidic hiss. Clean water was used to wipe the windows to remove the chemicals. I suggested wiping them down a few more times with clean water. The windows were allowed to dry and he said they looked almost new. A finishing Windexing and you could not tell that they had ever been anything but beautiful clear windows.
My friend called me the next day and said he thinks the fumes from The Works helped the bugs find the happy hunting grounds as there were bug remains found at the bottom of each window well. So if you have windows that need a resurrection and you have tried everything else then give this method a try. Just remember to respect your chemicals.
