As I walked around at the end of the second day, I realized that I truly have no idea what is happening to my house. For the downstairs windows the frames were set inside the old original frames. But on the upstairs level, every single window had the bottom board of the original frame removed. Take a careful look at these examples:
And to make this approach to the upstairs windows work, each window had the lower piece of exterior trim removed.
OK…so… earlier the Pella guys insisted that those boards couldn’t be taken out because they were the structure of my house. And now suddenly some were gone.
Because they were doing an insert replacement, rather than full frame, the trim was later wrapped. But now there was nothing to support the wrapping on the bottom of the upstairs windows. They wrapped air. Except for window 17, which had a scrap piece of trim screwed in:
(As you can see, the siding is dirty and badly in need of painting. That cleaning/repair/painting project began after the Pella window fiasco.)