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the window that wasn’t there
August 28, 2010
We’d owned our house for two years when I moved to Georgia to attend graduate school in the fall of 2005. My only visit home that year was in the dead of winter when we don’t see the neighbours much, so when I got home for the summer in May I had a lot of catching up to do with my neighbour, Joan. She was sitting on her porch steps telling me about a fire they’d had earlier in the spring that had begun in the hydro metres and spread up the side of the house, causing them to have to replace a section of the siding. We never go down the north side of the house (the sidewalk there belongs to the neighbours, and our sidewalk and side entrance are over on the south side) so it occurred to me to have a look and see whether their fire had damaged any of our siding. That’s when I noticed this:
A window, way up on the second floor, on a side of the house where none of our second floor rooms have windows. A window that somebody had covered up, but not removed, in our bathroom. Since I’m self centred enough to expect y’all to care but not quite so much to expect you to keep tabs, click this link to see what the bathroom looked like when we bought the place. It’s a universal truth that all homeowners have better taste than the people who owned it previously, and we’re no exceptions. I was in love with the house but unhappy that the bathroom had no window (always a top-three priority during my many years of bouncing back and forth between divey apartment rentals), and we were deeply, deeply unhappy with the whole awful look of that room. When the woman who sold us the house told me it was her favourite room in the house I bit my tongue. Hard.
Here’s what the room looked like after I plastered two-thirds of a wall with full page photos culled from old National Geographic magazines:
The colour palette shifts from pinky-red in the upper left corner through red, orange and yellow, and had I finished it would have continued in a spectrum all around the room. Peter talked me out of doing any more work on it because “we’ll be renovating it all soon”. Soon being a relative term, I suppose.
Fast forward to summer 2010 when we’re having insulation blown into all of the walls as part of the general energy efficiency fixup that pretty much every homeowner in the province is doing right now (in order to cash in on a government incentives programme). We had the insulation guys take out that window, saw through the wall from the outside, and put a new window in. And look! There’s light in our bathroom! Which otherwise looks the same, with one wall papered in photos only now it’s all ripped around the sawed window hole. Baby steps. We’ll get to it.
Let me tell you, peeing in the night without having to turn the light on is so excellent. I’d forgotten.
I wish I’d taken a photo of the archaeological layers inside that wall before the window guy put the tuck tape all around it. There was wood, then the original plaster (still in okay condition? I hope I hope I hope), then strips of styrofoam, then plywood, then the awful masonite fake tile stuff. And somewhere down along the bottom there is also a layer of ceramic tile over the plaster. Don’t ask me who does such things to houses, because that’s something I can’t quite fathom. All I know is that every single contractor or similar professional we’ve had in this place over the last seven years has said some version of “I’ve never seen anything like this before” and “let me show you how many ways in which things were done illegally here”. And of course there was the plumber who made a series of ablist jokes about our bathtub and then told me the whole second floor of our house was about to cave in.
Also? The punch line? Whoever covered this window up on the inside without removing it properly didn’t even take the blind down first.
Posted by jodi on August 28, 2010 at 8.13pm
Categories: this old house of ours is built on dreams
Comments on "the window that wasn’t there"
wow.. cool! The house my husband lived in when I first came to Athens had a window on the outside without a corresponding one on the inside. Upon further discovery, he found a secret room that had been walled over during a renovation. Inside were a child’s shoe, a tiny ring, and a few other small things from probably about the 20′s or 30′s when the mill was active. Discovering new/old fascinating things in old houses is why I’d love to own one sometime in the future.
Posted by mouse on August 28, 2010 at 9.47pm :: link
ha ha, that is a punch line.
Posted by Amelia on August 30, 2010 at 6.00pm :: link
[...] to be removed, the upstairs window that was covered over on the inside but left on the outside inaccessible but with the blind still in, and did I ever tell you about the wood stove for which, had we wanted to keep it, we would have [...]
Posted by jodi’s weblog :: not all befores are worth documenting on May 7, 2011 at 2.50pm :: link