This is one of my fave spots but it may take some explaining -
See, I told you. It's actually a huge kitchen window. Like many houses in Chicago, we have a basement. It's actually about two thirds underground and the top of the wall (left in photo) that you can see there is ground level. As you can imagine, it gets a lot of light and is great for plants. This winter however, has been so cold that I've had to move a lot of the plants away and into the warmer regions of the house. Windows conduct a lot of cold.
The window looks like this from other angles -
This is when I'm' standing in the kitchen looking at it. (Can you see the new dusting of snow on the window? In late March!!!) If you stand outside in the back garden, you'll see those windows rising from the ground to join the back wall. They're about three feet high.
And this is what the whole thing looks like from further back in the kitchen. The stairs lead up to the back door and then up to the dining room above. The shelf thing that you see (with rubbish on, waiting to be taken outside, I do beg your pardon) is actually where the original basement floor used to be. Given that we have family members over 6 feet tall, a 6 foot basement ceiling wasn't going to work really, so we had to dig down. The shelf thing is actually reinforcement, which we had to do all around the perimeter of the house. It comes in handy but, as you can see, is often a staging area for bits and bobs.
When we built the window like this originally, it was with a view to the kids (then 10, 7 and 0.5) using it as a reading nook. I was going to put large cushions in there etc. - but once we moved in, they showed no inclination to use it. (Probably because there's no TV or outlets there.) So now it's a plant place, as well as a means of spying on the dog when she's out in the back!
