My house was buit in 1953 with a detatched garage & a 16' x 20'open breezeway in between the house and garage. Sometime around 1970, the prior owners enclosed the breezeway with a front and back wall. Each wall has a storm door and 2 HUGE louvre-type aluminim windows. The inside walls are finished with white pine panneling. It is all very attractive.

When we were trying to fix the front wall storm door last year, we discovered that water has been running down inside the front wall since, oh, about the day the wall was built. We also discovered that whoever built the enclosing wall didn't actually ATTACH it at the top and bottom - it's framed up and kind of wedged in between the ceiling at the top and the concrete slab at the bottom (interesting construction method!).

We do plan to tear out both the front and back walls and rebuild them right. The confounding factor is that the prior owners also put aluminim siding over the original wood siding sometime in the 1970's. It looks AWFUL and we want to replace it. We will rebuild the walls at the same time, since we'll be taking the siding off. The problem is MONEY - we can't afford to do all this at once!

We had a huge wind storm this fall and a limb blew in to the front wall, breaking two panes in the windows. I've had 2 estimates from glass companies to replace the panes - one is $300 and one is $375. The panes are very large, non-standard size, and the way they are glazed into the aluminim frame is also very bizarre, which adds to the expense.

Here is my delima - I hate to spend $300 on these windows that we will replace when we rebuild the walls. We can't afford to do the siding now, which means rebuilding the walls & replacing the windows will also have to wait. Meanwhile, our house looks like trailer trash with 2 broken panes in the breezeway windows! We live in a really nice, well kept older neighborhood and I'm sure my neighbors are talking a about the broken panes already.

HELP - what would you do:

- go ahead and bite the bullet and replace the panes now?

- take off the hideous siding, rebuild the walls & replace the windows, and then put the hideous siding back on?

- Something else - if so, WHAT? I am out of ideas! (I even thought of removing all the glass in both front windows & just having screens but DH said absolutely no way to that idea.)