I live in an odd house. I have alluded to that fact in a previous post, but I would like to elaborate and eventually get to an explanation of the title.

Ever wanted a pantry that had a window with a view? My pantry had a  window with a view… of the back of a wall. I spent years of indecision regarding the best use of this area. It seemed like a shame to sheet rock over it. I thought about printing out a scenic picture to place behind it, but the glass was cracked and I couldn’t get to its outside for repairs. I thought about building a refrigeration unit and having cooled storage for the summer when the house gets hot, but that quickly became cost prohibitive. A secret cubby hole? Opening it up to the other room? A big fish tank? I finally decided to remove the window and put in some shelves.

Removing a window must be simple, I thought. There were some screws that looked like they held the window in place. I planned to remove the screws, slide the assembly out, make some shelves, and have have the whole thing together in time for dinner. I thought.

Over the following days, I realized that IT TAKES TWO people to build a house. One person to hold up the pantry window, and the other to build the house around it.

I removed all of the screws I could find, and the frame would wiggle but not slide out. I started piecing away, sawing, and chiseling the window frame from the inside. There were 50% odds they installed the assembly from the inside and I might be lucky. Nope. Oh well, I lost that gamble.

I know the window was installed (100% odds) and it had to go in from either the inside (50% odds) or outside (50% odds). Therefore, it was obviously installed from the outside. I painfully contorted myself to piece away, saw, and chisel the outside of the window frame from the inside. I removed enough material that it should have come free, but it didn’t budge. Apparently, 50% odds +  50% odds doesn’t always add up to 100%. The game was rigged.

I finally got ignorant with hammers, saws, crowbars, and broken glass. Apparently the builder framed the house, installed the window outside of the house’s frame, added some more 2x4s for spacing, then bricked the house. This left the window frame mounted inside of the structure and behind the bricks that are now embedded inside of the wall.. This might be common practice, but it is news to me. Please don’t tell my wife, but it might sometimes be minutely advisable in some extremely rare situations to hire someone who knows what they are doing.

Window out! Now to address the shelves. This is where I discovered that the two guys who built my house were so good that they didn’t need to use a straight edge or square. Building the shelf housing and shelves was like a geometry lesson: it took rhomboids, kites, obtuse trapezoids, and parallelograms… most of the quadrilaterals but oddly no squares or rectangles.

Needless to say, it is done now. It might not be the best solution, but sometimes any solution is better than no solution. AND, sometimes a solution now is better than a better solution down the road.

My advice from this little project?

Sometimes it is best to go ahead with some idea rather than waiting for the best idea.

Sometimes it might be remotely conceivable that occasionally there might be a rare situation when there is some small chance that it could possibly (but probably not) be worth consulting someone who knows what they are doing. I can’t be sure about that, though. It would be best to consult a professional.