How to Pick QUALITY Replacement Windows... The Home Inspector's Way

It's the eighth summer, and the corner of your living room window has gone gray. Not the outside. Not the inside. Somewhere in the middle, behind glass you can't reach. You wipe it. Nothing moves. The haze is sealed inside the pane, and every hot afternoon it spreads a little wider. You paid for the good ones. Fourteen thousand two hundred eighty dollars, eleven windows, the salesman in the nice polo who called them lifetime. You remember the word. Lifetime. So you dig out the folder, find the warranty, and read the sentence nobody read to you at the kitchen table. The seal is covered, parts only, prorated, and only if the original installer files the claim. That installer folded two years back. The reglaze quote comes in at three hundred seventy a window. Three have already fogged, with eight more behind them. You did everything right. You bought the expensive ones. You still lost. And the reason the afternoon sun keeps finding that gray corner is a part the salesman never once said out loud. I'm Hank. I've spent twenty-eight years inspecting and renovating homes, since 1998, somewhere north of ten thousand of them, and I've pulled more fogged windows out of walls than I can count.