La fenêtre de la cuisine, et les nouveaux volets

This is the window in our kitchen. It faces east, so it gets morning sun. It's cooler and shadier in the hottest part of the day, which is the afternoon. The window opening measures approximately 50 inches in width and 50 inches in height. It's a sliding, double-glazed PVC window that we had installed when we first came to live here, replacing an old French window that was single glazed.

French windows and doors traditionally open into the room they are installed in. In the case of this kitchen window, and in the case of similar windows in two small bedrooms in the house, that meant that as the the windows opened the glass panels pretty much swept across the entire room. One day, the woman who sold us the house in 2003 told me that one negative feature of the house (which her husband and his first wife had had built in about 1970) was something like les fenêtres sont trop grandes pour les pièces.

It took me a while to figure out what she meant. I think that was it. Sliding glass windows made a lot more sense, given the way the house was built. The window installer who put ours in told me later that he had been skeptical. He was pretty sure that we were going to hate the sliders. We didn't. It's what we had in San Francisco. I think they're great. Only the shutter (le volet roulant) on the kitchen window is a pain. First of all, it seems to take longer and longer to crank it up manually in the morning and down, again manually, at nightfall, as it ages. And it's dark when seen from inside the house as above.

Back in 2004, we had three windows on the back side of the house replaced with sliders. The old ones were leaking not just air but water. They faces west. We kept the old metal shutters for a few years but in 2018 had those windows fitted with roll-down shutters that are electric-powered. All you have to do is press a button and the shutter goes up or down. You can stop it when it's down or up far enough by pressing the button again. These shutters are solar powered, actually. You don't have to worry about power outages. And the sensor that re-charges the battery is powered even by dim daylight, not just sunlight. In other words, if we have a week or two of gray fog and rain, it doesn't matter. The shutters work just fine despite gloomy weather. They've been reliable for 6 or 7 years now. It's nice to be able to open an close the shutters without having to open the windows and let either hot or cold into the house.

Here's what the kitchen window looks like when the glass panels are closed or open and the old crank-operated shutter is closed. The wand and the crank mechanism are on the left. The new shutter that we're having installed today, along with new shutters on four smaller windows in the house, will be made of white PVC (vinyl). Two new shutters will also go on south-facing windows that really heat up when the sun shines brightly in summertime, making the house very hot. Two other new shutters will go on small, old, French-style windows that are single-glazed and drafty. They're up in the loft where we watch TV where we sleep. It will be nice to be able to "black out" the room in the daytime, and to be able to reduce evening and nighttime draftiness and noise.

Here's the kitchen window with the brown shutter and the curtains closed. Too dark, basically.