We live in a cute little 1930’s bungalow, with a cute little kitchen. Depending on my mood, sometimes the kitchen just seems little. One of its best features, though, is the so-called breakfast nook. If we only owned one or two pots and got rid of all of the countertop appliances, then maybe we could acutally put a table and chairs in the nook and eat our breakfat there — as it is, we need to claim every cranny in the nook for additional storage and counter space. This weekend, we found a way to give a purpose to some truly wasted space inside of a window.

See, the nook was originally built to jut out from the back of our house with windows on all three walls — creating a charming, sunny little spot. At some point, previous owners must have had a porch or a deck added on next to it in the backyard. And then sometime after that, the porch was enclosed and converted into an additional room (which I have gratefully claimed as my craft room). The result is that one of the three kitchen windows that used to have a view to the outside, has now been sporting a view of drywall. Not so charming.

For the past couple of years that we’ve lived here, I’ve just put up curtains to cover the bogus window and pretty much ignored it. Recently, my mother had the brilliant brainstorm to convert the empty window cavity into a built-in bookshelf. With help from my handy dad, we finally acted on her idea this weekend with great success! Kate and dad even took it one step further and figured out a way to wire an outlet into the shelf so that we could fit in a small microwave. Is that awesome or what?

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 23rd, 2005 at 10:34 am and is filed under House Projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.