Darkness descends

One of the downsides of the renovation plans is that it meant losing two of our kitchen windows. The current layout of the house has the kitchen and family room extending out in the back, so that the kitchen has windows on two sides and is nice and airy with lots of natural light. The renovation would basically extend the garage area and line up with the edge of the kitchen/family room, making the footprint of the house a perfect rectangle. So that meant one of the (current) exterior walls of the kitchen, which has two windows (one over the sink, one over in the eat-in kitchen area) would become the bedroom wall, with the windows taken out and dry-walled over.

This is probably the part of the design that I am least thrilled with, but there really wasn't any other option. So what we are doing to cope with losing the windows is increasing the natural light in other ways. We are going to enlarge the remaining window in the eat-in kitchen area, making it a double-width window rather than a single window. That should help quite a bit. Second, we are going to install a large skylight in the roof directly above the kitchen proper, which should make things quite a bit lighter, if the experience we had with our master bathroom is any guide. The skylight there helped immensely to brighten up that room.

Wagner warned us about a couple of things when I told him that we wanted the skylight. First, it would add noticeably to the expense of the project. More important, he said that installing the skylight would actually be the most disruptive and intrusive part of the entire renovation in terms of interfering with our lifestyle. There will be a period of about a week where kitchen activities will be disturbed, and we'll have a huge hole in our roof with plastic sheeting covering it. We'll have to repaint the kitchen ceiling, etc. But I kept remembering how I had concluded that the skylight in our master bath was a huge success and I was really glad we had gone for it... so I told Wagner that the hassle and expense were worth it and we wanted a kitchen skylight.

Now I am extremely happy we made that decision. The crew recently placed plywood boards over the two kitchen windows (to prevent glass breakage as they remove the brick from the exterior of that wall). Soon they will be covered over permanently. And so my nice bright pretty kitchen for now has now been transformed into a still pretty but dim kitchen. I'm looking forward to getting more sunlight back.