Putting the final touches on the kitchen window project

It’s so gratifying to finally put the last finishing touch on a project. Perhaps that’s because it happens so infrequently around here — the nursery is still only about 90 percent done, with a handful of little things still outstanding.

But the kitchen window shelf project officially wrapped up Friday afternoon after I picked up the glass shelves in NoMa during the day and installed them in the kitchen window after work before rushing back out to meet Rachel and half a dozen friends down at the Petworth Community Market to hang out and stock up on fresh fruit, veggies and bread.

If you want to read the whole story, here’s the three posts that chronicle this entire story from beginning to end. What do do with this old leftover kitchen window? The first post where I tried to decide what to do with the window and solicited comments from readers for some guidance. A year later, turning an old window into something new, and A year later, turning an old window into something new (part two): the nuts and bolts of the entire project from beginning to here.

Here’s how the window looked after the kitchen was done and we moved into the house.

And once we decorated a little bit and tried to hide how ugly the window really was. Yes, that’s a red dish towel draped over the ugly sill.

And once I knocked out the remaining glass and the sash and prepped the entire area for the work. You can see the same red dish towel on the counter to the left, actually. Ha.

You can read the details of how I removed the sash and old window, stripped all the paint off of the old frame, extended the sill and built the interior frame to cover up those unsightly grooves in the side to transform it into a nice looking empty window opening in those previous 3 posts, but here are a few pictures from the process.

So that brings us to the shelves. I got the floating shelf mounts for the glass shelves online a few weeks ago and already had them mounted to the inside edge. We opted to raise the first shelf up high enough so that we could put flowers or something tall on the new expanded sill, and then split the remaining difference in half for the higher shelf.

The brackets were in place and waiting for the glass for a couple of weeks while I got it ordered and picked up from Herson Glass here in DC on Florida Ave. (They did great work at a good price. Recommend.)

So Friday afternoon, I just had to slide the shelves in and screw the mounting screws down onto the shelf. The screws are flat and tipped with rubber so as not to scratch or damage the glass.

Once the shelves were in, I pulled out a few of my favorite Belgian beer glasses to line up on the top shelf. And with that, this project was a wrap!

And a before/after

What do you think? Best use of the space in this old window frame? Think we should have done something else?