{"id":23107,"date":"2025-11-28T22:22:47","date_gmt":"2025-11-29T06:22:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.emilymorganti.com\/blog\/?p=23107"},"modified":"2025-11-28T22:27:11","modified_gmt":"2025-11-29T06:27:11","slug":"stained-glass-kitchen-window-and-a-light-over-the-sink","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.emilymorganti.com\/blog\/?p=23107","title":{"rendered":"Stained glass kitchen window and a light over the sink"},"content":{"rendered":"

I mentioned at the end of my last post<\/a> that the doors on the over-the-sink cabinets didn’t close all the way and I wasn’t sure I wanted to mess with them anymore. <\/p>\n

Well, I messed with them. I removed each shelf, shaved off a small amount of the back using a utility knife, and glued them back in. Easy fix, really.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Moving on. As shown here<\/a>, I started adding lights to the kitchen two and a half years ago (yikes). I had planned to use this light over the sink, made from two Houseworks fixtures that I frankensteined together.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The wire is hidden under the roof, and feeds into the nursery where it will be plugged in. (Oh yeah, that’s why I went down this sink cabinet rabbit hole three months ago… I wanted to finish the kitchen electricity so I could work on the nursery<\/a>…)<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Later I moved that fixture out into the room and put this one in the bump-out.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

But that light gets in the way of the upper cabinets. Time for a new plan. I decided to insert a Cir-Kit screw-base bulb socket<\/a> behind the cornice on the uppers, same as I did with the stove hood<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The piece of trim glued across the top of the cabinets doesn’t go all the way back to the wall. This pencil line shows where that trim ends. I have just enough space to drill a hole for the fixture.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I hadn’t considered that this fixture is a little taller than the thickness of the top of the bump-out, so the back side sticks out. I can add strip wood around the edges of the bump-out to make it a little taller. This will provide a cavity under the roof where I can leave some excess wire, allowing me to pull the fixture out into the kitchen if I need to change the bulb.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Inside, the bulb will be hidden behind the cornice.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Now it’s time to do something about that big gaping window hole. After a lot of pondering, looking through my stash at different windows, and looking online at pictures of kitchens, I got the idea to make a stained glass window out of laser-cut mullions (sold by D’s Miniatures on eBay<\/a>). <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

A few years ago, I used one of these mullions to make a stained glass window on the Seaside Villa<\/a>. I remembered that the mullion had been kind of thick for this purpose, requiring a lot of paint to fill in the spaces.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

There were two separate listings for the mullions I was looking at. Initially I thought they were the same, but then I realized one was 1\/16″ thick<\/a> and one was 1\/32″ thick<\/a>. (The mullion I used for the Seaside Villa was 1\/16″ thick.)<\/p>\n

I bought two of the 1\/32″ mullions.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I colored them black with Sharpie.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I used a utility knife to cut down a piece of plastic from a Houseworks window, and then glued a mullion to each side.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

These mullions are meant to take up the top half of a double-hung window. Here’s one on the Victorianna.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In the Mansard Victorian’s kitchen, I’ll turn it sideways. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Once the trim is added, this will be exactly the right width to fit between the two upper cabinets.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

With the bottom of the window trim right up against the top of the sink, the window *just* fits in the hole that’s already here.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

My plan had been to attach the trim directly to the backsplash piece, but as I tried to figure out how to do this (bent over sideways reaching into the bump-out), I decided it would work better not to. So, I cut that part away.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Since I would no longer be gluing the window trim to the backsplash piece, I added strip wood around the edge of the window to give the trim a surface to attach to.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

(After taking the picture, I remembered the top of the window needs to be right up against the top of the window opening for the window to fit properly behind the sink, so I pulled off the wood piece I’d added to the top.)<\/p>\n

To stain-glassify the window, I spread Gallery Glass paint over the panes with a toothpick. The white paint dries clear.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Here it is after one coat — very faint.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I flipped the window over, painted the other side, and went away for a few minutes. When I came back one of the mullion pieces looked like this. Oh no!<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Using the toothpick tip, I tried to gently push it back into position and the wood broke.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The two pieces seemed too big to fit back together. I ended up removing one of them.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

It looked like this when the paint dried. If you look at the window head-on, it’s fine, because the black piece behind the window pane shows through and hides the gap. But from the side, you can see there’s a hunk missing.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I decided to use the non-broken side facing into the kitchen, since you’ll always view that window from an angle. Further down I’ll show my attempt to repair it on the side where it shows.<\/p>\n

I prepared pieces of strip wood to fill in the sides of the window hole, with smaller strips at the edges to hold the window in place. Then I glued on the window trim at the bottom and sides, but left the top off.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Here’s how it’ll look in place (leaning slightly since nothing’s glued in yet). Since the top of the window is right up against the top of the hole, I’ll glue the top piece of trim to the wall rather than to the window.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

And here it is from the back. I prepared another piece of wood to cover the gap at the bottom, but it wasn’t in place when I took this picture.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Can you see where the mullion above the diamond was patched? I used Gallery Glass Liquid Lead, which is a sort of thick gray\/black goop that looked bad when I tried to use it for lead lines<\/a> but did a passable job filling in that gap. After it dried, I touched it up with Sharpie to make it the same shade of black as the rest. It’s not smooth like the rest of the lead lines, but it’s less offensive than the gap was.<\/p>\n

I still have work to do on this, but I stuck the uppers and crown molding in with wax to see how it’ll all come together.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Looking good! Now let’s get a picture with the light on… I’ll just move the camera into the house a bit more to see it from the front… acckkkk!<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Okay, that looks terrible. Luckily you can never see into the bump-out like this when you’re looking at the house. I could try adding a shim to the right side of the cabinet and making the crown molding longer, to get more snugly into the corner, but it’s unnecessary. <\/p>\n

The top is another story. I’m not sure why the crown doesn’t want to sit flush against the ceiling — at first I thought it was because the piece was too long, but that’s clearly not the case! (Actually, zooming in on the picture, it could be that the top corner of the crown is running into the paper that’s not tight in the corner of the bump-out.)<\/p>\n

Regardless, I’ll need to block off the crack at the top where the light is showing through. I have a couple ideas.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I mentioned at the end of my last post that the doors on the over-the-sink cabinets didn’t close all the way and I wasn’t sure I wanted to mess with them anymore. Well, I messed with them. I removed each shelf, shaved off a small amount of the back using a utility knife, and glued […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[37,19,39,100],"class_list":["post-23107","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dollhouses","tag-electricity","tag-half-scale","tag-kitchen","tag-mansard-victorian","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.emilymorganti.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23107","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.emilymorganti.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.emilymorganti.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emilymorganti.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emilymorganti.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23107"}],"version-history":[{"count":103,"href":"https:\/\/www.emilymorganti.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23107\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23213,"href":"https:\/\/www.emilymorganti.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23107\/revisions\/23213"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.emilymorganti.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emilymorganti.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23107"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emilymorganti.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}