Living in Hawai'i where we have warm weather year-round, many of us live in homes with windows and doors that include screens to allow the cool breezes to circulate freely through without having to keep your air-conditioning unit(s) running or for keeping insects out. However, if you live in a high-rise condominium, that has been built within the past 2 decades, you'd undoubtedly either have floor to ceiling glass or awning windows that only open a foot out or you might be lucky to have large horizontal sliding windows and a sliding door that opens to a lanai to allow fresh air in.
So here's my ranting or "whinging":
We've lived in apartments, houses and townhouses that all had window and sliding door screens but recently, when we bought into a condominium project we immediately noticed there weren't any window or door screen treatments. You might not think that birds or insects can fly ABOVE 20 floors but trust me...they CAN. Also, dust or soot from the streets below comes up with the wind currents. So, what am I complaining about? I should/could run our air-conditioning 24/7 with all of my windows or sliding door closed but hey, nothing beats fresh air when the sun is shining outside.
Our solution was to find a reputable and quality windows and doors vendor and installer. Trusting our Yelp app, we found several 4 and 5 star rated businesses but they all seem to be located further away from Honolulu or told us they were simply too busy to address our issues. Luckily, we looked up some of the business cards that we had collected from a BIA (Building Industry Association) of Hawai'i home improvement show and found The Window & Door Store, a Division of Screens & Things.
The Window & Door Store is located near the corner of Isenberg and Beretania Streets in the Moiliili neighborhood. It shares a building with a music center and has a private parking lot on the same lot.
We met with Robert Kincaid who was knowledgeable, friendly and upfront as we discussed our needs. He showed us several products that would be applicable to our sliding door and walk-in showers and bathtub. We talked about materials, decorative options, cost, installation and scheduling an estimator (who is familiar with our condominium) to come over to our unit.
Now, all we have to do is wait until next week as we "start the ball rolling" on some of our Summer home improvement projects. read more