Window Remodel: update + musings

The parts came in for my contractor's other job, so he will be starting the windows next Wednesday.
I wish I'd been blogging during the kitchen and bath projects. Most of you got the updates from me via email, but it would've been entertaining to have them all in one place so that I could go back and read it.
For reasons that I can't quite comprehend, my brother has very vehement anti-remodeling sentiment. It certainly wasn't from being overexposed to it as a child. We're both cheap and suspicious of the bubble-induced herd mentality, so that may be part of it, and he's seen friends get burned in the real estate market. He thinks it's a waste of money and a sign of being a yuppie scumbag. "It's so 2005", he said. Perhaps it is.
While I agree that there were lots of people who took it way too far, I don't think I'm one of them. Of course, I'm biased. I've lived in my house for almost nine years. At some point I realized that I didn't want to change the location or size of my house, but just make it work better for me. If I sell it, I may not get back all of my investment, but then again, maybe I will - the kitchen, which was the big ticket project, was paid for mainly through the sale of stocks, which of course are worth a lot less now. In any case, I'm glad I did it.
My brother's other objection is that people get so wrapped up in their houses as a way of finding meaning in their lives or avoiding dealing with other stuff. I had to chew on this one a bit more. In fact, I'm still pondering it. My peak remodeling years coincided with the latter half of my relationship with T. Partly it was because I started to see my house from a new perspective, and there were things that I'd just gotten used to, even though they bothered me when I first moved in. The same could be said about T himself - I'd gotten used to things about him that had bothered me at first. He certainly encouraged me to do it, since he likes to be the armchair remodeler. (He moves a lot more slowly when it's his own project.) And, to give him credit, he had some good ideas and supported me. However, I do think that my brother has a point, and in retrospect, perhaps I was doing it to distract myself from facing reality about T while at the same time I had accepted that I would be in my house for a while longer and I'd better make it the way I wanted it to be.
Of course, my brother does like to torment me, so perhaps that explains it!