The Window

We've been in our current house for almost sixteen years and for all those years I have been complaining about my kitchen. It's small but so are all the kitchens in our village. Ours measures approximately 8 by 12 and when we moved in the walls were covered with cheap, dark paneling. As if that wasn't cavernous enough, there are no windows. The floor tiles were a yellowish-orange that over the years had faded unevenly. Needless to say, I have an ugly kitchen. It seems like each time we had tried to make time to fix it, something has come up that takes us away from the project. We did manage to paint the cabinets white which cheered it up a bit but it still has been a very unpleasant place to cook and do dishes.

With a three-day weekend all our own we started on the remodeling - FINALLY. Over a year ago Jim had resurfaced the empty walls - the ones without the counter, cabinets and refrigerator. This weekend we are working on the back walls. Olga from across the street has been telling us for years that we have a window somewhere in the kitchen but it had been covered over so cabinets could be mounted. Houses built like ours in the 1930's didn't have cabinets in the kitchens so when they came into fashion, the windows had to be sacrificed. The outside of our house is covered with vinyl siding so we could never find out if there was a window or not. We were skeptical about Olga's recollections because she had originally told us we had a kitchen window on the back wall so we had moved the fridge and uncoved the back wall about two years only to find ugly OLD wall board that had to be resurfaced.

Needless to say this kitchen has been an ongoing misery. However, not this weekend. So far Jim, with the help of our grandsons, Cody, Justin and Nick have taken the cabinets off the walls and pulled off the paneling. In doing this, they have uncovered the hidden window and not just any little window but a 32" by 36" window. The true amazement of the window didn't end there. Years earlier Jim noticed a perfectly good window in the trash as he walked passed a neighbor's on the way to the bus stop. He brought the window home and it has been resting in our garage for probably 8 years. I scolded him and argued that it was taking up space and how he shouldn't take things from people's garbage. Well, well, didn't I have to eat my words when we measured and found out that the window he retrieved is EXACTLY the size window we needed for the kitchen.

We've picked out a countertop and backsplash and hope to get these installed tomorrow.

The hole where the window should be

Stay tuned for the remodeling updates...