Gratuitous Window-Letting

So this happened: We added a window indoors.

It was all Kathy's idea. I just wielded the saw. The whole thing started about three years ago when we remodeled the ghastly second-floor bathroom. Among its many atrocities was a walled-in commode with some sort of fancy stick work above it. We demolished the wall but saved the nice piece of turned wooden trim. Once we took it down and had a closer look, it was clear that it wasn't originally from the bathroom, but had been borrowed from somewhere else and repurposed. So we stored it away for later...

Fast-forward three years and we found a home for it. The top of the stairwell on the third floor is a bit dark, despite having a skylight. The problem is, the skylight is on one side of a wall, so it lights up the hallway just fine, but no light gets into the stairs. We can fix that.

If you look really closely, you can see that I've cut a rectangular hole in the wall here and started to peel away the wallpaper, exposing a bit of the lath and plaster. This is the one and only time I've cut away original plaster, but we think it's justified. The back side of this wall is covered with drywall, so somebody obviously demolished part of it before. (In fact, almost all of the third floor is drywall, not plaster.)

Once the hole was opened up we had a perfect spot to mount the old piece of stick work. Luckily, it's just a little narrower than the space between three wall studs, so I cut out the middle stud, paired up some 2x4s to made a header, and cut two jack studs to redistribute the load. Like always, I had to mill and/or shim the modern lumber to match the dimensions of the old 2x4s in the wall, which really are 2 inches by 4 inches. Every project takes twice as long in this house.

In goes the "window." We trimmed it out with a bit of ash and molding, and it's about ready to paint. It's not nailed in, but floats inside the trim so it can expand/contract with changes in humidity. So far, it seems to do the job. It lets in light from the skylight, and makes the hallway on the other side a bit less claustrophobic. And it's one less thing we need to store in the attic.