Twenty-Five Windows

There are twenty-five windows in the Harrison.

When I first counted them, they felt like another item on a growing list of things that needed attention. Some were missing altogether. Others had to be removed so I could work on the interior. None of them were as straightforward as I had hoped.

Like so much of this house, every window seemed to uncover another layer of glue. Before I could begin installing replacements, I spent hours carefully working around hot glue, construction adhesive, and years of well-intentioned repairs that had become part of the house itself. It was slow work.......patient work, frustratingly necessary work. The kind of work that doesn't make a project look dramatically different at the end of the day.

Many of the original acrylic panes were missing, so my husband came to the rescue. We had a stack of old acrylic sign holders tucked away in the workshop, and he cut replacement panes from them, giving material that would have otherwise been discarded a second life.

One by one, the windows began finding their way back into the house.

Something unexpected happened as they did. Until then, I'd been focused on repairs.

Replacing acrylic, cleaning old glue and rebuilding window openings. Solving one problem after another.

But as the windows returned, the rooms began to reveal themselves. I wasn't looking at construction anymore. I was looking through the windows into a kitchen, a bedroom.....a quiet corner beneath the roofline. The house stopped feeling like a restoration and started feeling like a home. That shift changed everything.

I removed the bay window seats in the kitchen to make room for a better layout, giving the sink a place beneath the bay window where I had imagined it from the beginning. Upstairs, I rebuilt the missing bench top in one of the bay windows and stained it to match the rest of the woodwork. Suddenly, I could picture someone sitting there while morning light streamed through the glass.

Then I found the flooring for the kitchen. It wasn't the first floor I had considered, but the moment I laid it in place, I knew it belonged there. The warm tones quietly tied together everything I had been imagining for the rest of the house.

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And on the third floor, the room with the French doors finally revealed itself. From the beginning, I wasn't sure what it wanted to become. Then, almost without thinking, I pictured shelves lined with books, a comfortable sofa tucked beneath the windows, and a quiet place to disappear for an afternoon. It had become a reading room.

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That's one of my favorite moments in every restoration;

Not when the painting is finished.

Not when the trim goes on.

But when the house begins to tell me how someone might live there.

I've learned that every project has a moment when it stops being a collection of tasks and starts becoming something much more personal. For the Lodge Harrison, that moment arrived one window at a time. By the time the last panes were in place, I wasn't counting windows anymore. I was looking through them.