Which is the bigger decision that a married couple makes – replacing your bed pillows or replacing your windows? Both are big decisions. I remember legendary Boston talk host Eddie Andelman once spending a whole three-hour show talking about pillows (he pronounced them “peelows”) because it was a subject so near and dear to his heart. See, the problem with replacing pillows is that you get used to the ones you’ve had for so long, and by replacing them you’re allowing virtual strangers into your house and bed. Buying pillows is not easy to do. How do you test them out? Do you lay on the floor of the store and try one after another? Do you risk buying them online without so much as a trial test? And to make matters worse, pillows come in all sizes, shapes, and materials, not to mention price. And now they have pillows for back sleepers, side sleepers, and stomach sleepers. But what if you’re a combination of the two? And how would you know what you are? Or whether that $30 pillow is gonna feel better under your head than that $100 one?

Because we had two beds to buy pillows for Tracey and I originally went with the shotgun approach, buying three different kinds hoping that one would fit the bill. The side sleeper one we bought seemed to fit Tracey’s needs, but the other two kinds were thicker than the ones we’d been using by a long shot – I kept having dreams about heights all night long, and Tracey didn’t sleep a wink! So I went back to Kohl’s and picked out the very first one I had thought about buying the previous day because it was really squishy and you could shape it into whatever way you felt like any given night without it getting too thick. Voila! mission accomplished, and two good night’s sleeps.

Windows, while far more expensive than pillows, are yet another complex decision once you decide to pull the trigger. We replaced the windows back in the condo we lived in when we were first married, but that was more than twenty years ago and the choices one has with windows has only multiplied exponentially since then. All sorts of double-pane and triple-pane, and a wide variety of materials and tints and coatings to choose from. For us, the big thing here in the Valley of the Sun is keeping out the heat and the UV rays because of the strength of the sun. And we found a manufacturer other folks in our subdivision have used out of the local Lowe’s, so that helped with the choices as well. Because today is the big day for the installers to arrive, we spent the weekend taking down plantation shutters (inside) and the ugly brown window screens (outside), and clearing everything away from the windows both outside and in to make sure the installers have nothing to slow them down. There are fifteen windows to replace in 110-degree heat so we wanted to reduce the amount of prep work as much as possible.

We’re looking forward to being able to have natural daylight in all our rooms without the heat pouring through like it does now. We’re also looking forward to seeing what kind of an impact it has on our electric bill. Just replacing the old pool filter with a modern dual-speed solution back in May resulted in $40 dollars of savings on our electric bill in June; we’re hoping for similar results by having the windows replaced. Since buying the house we’ve replaced our attic insulation, A/C unit, and pool filter. The windows will be the last step in getting our house as energy-efficient as possible.