Picture Window Replacement for Dummies

No stops, no sashes: what now, Marsanne?

Normally, we start our DotD award ceremonies by introducing the question at hand, but today's a little different: we're gonna make fun of the image that accompanies our post. See, the topic of the post is "How to Replace a Picture Window,"¹ and it appears at HomeSteady.com (i.e., a former eHow.com post niched by Leaf Group). Someone, probably not writer Marsanne Petty, placed a photo at the top of the post with the caption "Picture windows allow homeowners to have a grand view of the outdoors" – except the image is of a family sitting on a couch while Mama wields her remote. Dolts!

Petty isn't blameless, however, or she wouldn't have been nominated. She started out by telling her readers why someone might want to replace a picture window,

"...picture windows can become aged-looking and homeowners may want to replace them. Replacing picture windows can offer benefits that homeowners may not first think about, such as a savings on their heating or cooling bills. Almost a third of heated and cooled air can escape through cracks that are practically invisible, but are nonetheless there—in the caulk and around the windows."

When you come right down to it, however, that's merely a reword of some vendor's spiel for replacement windows. In fact, the entire post is reworded from that vendor's website, right down to "Examine your sills. Make sure there's no wood rot. If the frame is compromised, it doesn't make any sense to install replacement windows"; which Petty spun into,

"Examine the window sill on the inside and outside to ensure that the window frame is sturdy. There should be no rotten or soft spots in the wood frame."

We suppose that would be fine... except that Marsanne continues to merely reword the website's instructions, including posting these suspicious steps:

• Remove the stops on the inside of your original window frame.
• Remove the sashes from the frame.
• Replace the inside stops in your window frame.

Our staff window expert, who's replaced a few windows and done quite a bit of work on windows in old houses, looked at Petty's instructions and laughed. He laughed because those are instructions for replacing a single- or double-hung sash window, which definitely is not the same thing as a picture window.

This is pretty much the sort of dreck you get when a greed-sucking freelancer tries to write about an unfamiliar topic by googling it and using the first search results. This post doesn't answer the question at all, yet Demand Media and Leaf Group left it intact for more than eight years – and Marsanne Petty went on to write plenty more entries in the Dumbass of the Day sweepstakes!

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   ehow.com/how_5758840_replace-picture-window.html

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