A photographic walk through the window replacement

HomoDommi is at this very moment taking a bus back to our rainy city to move into the next phase of kitchen construction.  Since he left, at the start of the month, we have had our good friend Mike the Contractor in to work on the windows.

To start, this is how the relevant corner of the kitchen has looked since roughly the late 1950's (not including the island in the foreground, with the basket of broccoli on it).  We are looking due north in this photo.

For the edification of those tracking the progress of the walls, I refer to the wall straight ahead alternately as, the "north" or "exterior" or "bathroom door" wall. The wall on the left is alternately known as the "west", or "sink" wall (because in the final kitchen, the sink will be there), and very rarely, the "basement stair wall", because it is adjacent to the basement stairs, as you will see in the next photo.

This next photo was taken during the main dismantling of the room in February. Taking out the cabinets on the west wall left no wall at all (the solid bit had been a 3/4" sheet of very high quality plywood, with no studs. The upper cabinets were built down from the soffit, the lower cabinets up from the floor).

(Here, you can see a door to the outside, on the north wall, which opens to a small landing in the stairs to the basement, about 3 feet below the floor of the kitchen.)

The window in the north wall was not original to the house -- the frame was made of a golden pine matching the kitchen cabinets, not the fir everywhere else, and the opening mechanism involved sliding on poles, not weighted sashes. It must have been a mass-produced window that they had to cut to fit the space (except it didn't fit the space -- it is too big, both visually and physically -- the frame was carved around the upper cabinets). The windows never opened reliably.

Our house has quite plain, double-hung, single-pane, sash windows framed in fir (learn about the names of the parts of a window here). The plainness was a cost-saving alternative, we believe, selected by the builder (the identical house across the street, built a year or two earlier, has fancier windows with muntins). We think that the north wall will be a dominant feature in the kitchen, so we wanted something a little more interesting than plain, but still within period for the house.

We shopped forever.  HomoDommi and I actually had bought a beautiful old window to replace this one in 2008, but we mis-measured and it was too big.  There are about four used architectural supply shops in the city, and we haunted them for weeks, trying to find a window of approximately the right size, that would match the original feel of the house.  We could have made one (from individual panes, readily available) but getting the casing to work well with sashes is tricky, so we held out for a complete window. Which we managed to find in late March.

It is definitely period -- lots of houses around here have this style of window -- even if our house doesn't. It is taller and narrower than the 1950s window, but fits securely under the original header used by whatever window was there in 1915. In my opinion, it isn't the perfect window -- it is still just a little too big -- but it is an improvement over what was there, and it was available (hence, good enough).

At the same time that we are reducing the window on the north wall, we want to have as much light as possible in the kitchen. So we decided to add an interior window over where the sink will be, which gets indirect light through the glass in the exterior door in the north wall (see photo #2 above). The view there isn't exciting -- it's a blank wall opposite and the sloping ceiling over the stairs -- so we wanted the window to be interesting to look at in itself, rather than to be something one looks through.

Again, much shopping. The Texan found this window in a local antique shop, among two dozen others. The shop owner said they have stained glass windows of this sort shipped from England as fillers inside the armoires that the shop specializes in -- every shipment is unique and fairly random.  This was the most interesting of the windows available at the time, with that nice little arched brow.

(The stained glass image itself is a kind of Rorschach.  Girl-Child says it is a flower. I see a puffy-sleeved house-keeper resting for a moment in the heat of mid-day.)

The current status of both windows is: installed, but not finished. It's pretty obvious what is needed on the sink wall window -- the rest of the wall.  The exterior window needs to be weighted, and none of the outer finishing work is done (i.e., no siding or framing). Because the wood on both windows is not particularly fine, we are planning to paint, not stain, both of them -- the only departure in treatment from the rest of the ground floor.

Strictly speaking, the window over the sink-to-be is not period to the house, and is something of a stretch in the design. We do have stained glass elsewhere (some nice grapes in the windows over the built-in buffet in the dining room) which ideally we would have matched here in the kitchen. But even that would not have been "kosher" of course -- no right-minded builder in 1915 would put stained glass in a kitchen. The arched brow is another feature that doesn't match the rest of the house, nor does it match the other new-old window in the kitchen.  But this is where I'm counting on the unique charm of the other features of the house -- the mural, the studio, the bike cellar -- to open the overall design to be something a little more organic. This becomes the unique touch in the kitchen.