How We Are Repurposing The Original Living Room Windows At The Farmhouse (In The PANTRY??)

What to do with the OG original windows has been a debate since day 2. First, we thought we were keeping all. Then we thought we were replacing them all, but we landed on keeping all the original on the 2nd floor, and adding new ones on the first floor that tie in with the original windows. The gist was that we knew we were opening up the first floor windows to be MUCH BIGGER so we’d need some new ones no matter what, and mixing new and old in the same room is a challenge. Plus, remember the rest of the windows on the first floor were not original – they were aluminum from the ’60s or vinyl from the ’90s…here are photos to refresh you (and you can read more about them in this post).

The Awesome Original Farmhouse Windows

The Less-Awesome Aluminum Or Vinyl Windows

So there are actually only 3 original windows that were removed with no future home. Of course, we are dreaming of a greenhouse someday made of them, but then we found the PERFECT solution.

But first, remember the original pantry/mudroom layout before we moved the kitchen?? Here’s a refresher of where we landed a few months ago when we had ‘draft 1’ completed:

WELL, we fell in love with the walk-in pantry idea up there, but then we decided to move the kitchen altogether – to get it closer to the windows. By losing our mudroom we thought maybe we should put in a mini mudroom/entrance where our pantry was going to be, like this:

But we missed the walk-in pantry so much, so we figured out a solution on where to put the mudroom (if you’re interested, feel free to read more about the mudroom saga here)…

SO, for the first time ever we will have a walk-in pantry. We cook a ton and have carved out the space so mama gets her walk-in pantry. More on the pantry plan later, but trust me we are making it hyper functional (and yes, so pretty).

We had planned to do something interesting to separate the pantry from the kitchen, but it was TBD. We knew we wanted that entrance to involve glass to allow light and keep it feeling open, but separated so we figured some sort of vintage/salvaged doors or windows. We of course considered the original windows but they are double-hung and super-wide so they would be too big and now allow for a big enough entrance.

When I was over there a few weeks ago it became obvious and I lit up with excitement. We would hang the two unused OG vintage windows vertically so that the diamond pattern sits inside a frame that gives separation between the kitchen and pantry. Like so:

So I asked Stephyn to draw it in and see if it would actually fit and guess what? IT DID.

Of course we have to figure out how it should all be finished – how to integrate the window into the “wall” but we are thinking paneling, maybe some peg rails, and maybe even a shelf or plate rail along the top spanning the whole wall.

THEN I was at the farm with a friend a couple of weeks ago and they were like ‘a window goes here, right?’ and I said ‘uh, no …..??”. Truly we joke that this is the swiss cheese house, with so many windows and skylights (all double-paned, all UV, don’t worry) that we can’t believe we missed this opportunity. Here’s where we’re talking about:

The wall is on an angle so we weren’t able to put an upper cabinet or shelf there anyway. But our window order from Sierra Pacific was placed months ago (And was supposed to arrive this week but we had issues with delivery on our end) so we couldn’t add it. You might have seen on stories that I found another vintage window from eBay…it was the perfect size for just under $300 and it ties in with the diamond pattern AND the more simple grid pattern in the kitchen (which is two panes over two panes, dubbed a ‘2 over 2’).

And here are screenshots of the video of me taking it out of the box. Yes, some paint did chip slightly upon unboxing. We might need to do some minor repairs to it (whoops) 🙂

Technically we have one original window from the first floor left to use somewhere (TBD), while the rest of the upstairs gets repaired. So stay tuned for some more window chat coming soon 🙂