The Tale of the CO and the Windows

Spring 2009 - One of the issues that came up during the period between signing our contract and officially closing on our house was the Certificate of Occupancy (aka "CO"). John had warned us that our township was notorious for tacking on ridiculous requirements, and our house was not spared. Case in point: shortly before closing, we were notified that the township was refusing to issue a CO due to "chipping paint on the exterior of the first floor windows."

For those who may not know, a CO ensures the habitability of a structure. Things like "Does the house have windows?" would be a valid question. "Are they pretty windows?" would not. Nonetheless, we were being told that we would only be given a temporary CO until we "scraped, painted and reglazed" the exterior of all first floor windows (there are 12). Never mind that the second floor windows looked just as bad - apparently they did not care. And this temporary CO would only be good for 90 days, after which time we would literally be locked out of the house if we failed to meet the requirements of a permanent CO.




Exhibit A - The old windows



Don't get me wrong, we were in complete agreement with the township's assessment that the windows were both unattractive and inefficient. The problem, as we saw it, was that our ultimate goal of replacing every window in the house made it a complete waste of time and money to "scrape, paint and reglaze" the original windows. And unfortunately, we could not possibly afford to replace all 22 windows (the original estimate we got was $22,000 - which, by the way, we would NEVER pay) or even the 12 on the first floor, within 90 days of closing.

What we were able to do in the first 90 days was replace the 5 windows on the front of the house. We wrote to the township and basically begged them to see what great strides we were making and trust that we intended to continue replacing windows as we were able. Thankfully, it worked! We were granted a permanent CO and no longer had to worry about coming home to signs rendering our house "uninhabitable" because of our ugly windows.



The Replacements



For thos who might be interested - we ended up going with American Craftsman 8500 series windows. The largest windows in our living room and dining room are over 6 feet tall and 3 feet wide, and ran around $200 each. Tom at the Home Depot in the Market Place at Garden State Park in Cherry Hill was incredibly helpful in walking us through the installation process and to date we have installed 11 windows all by ourselves (read: free installation)!