Our neighbours have long been accustomed to seeing my husband busy doing things around our house. He is forever building things, designing things, changing what is already there, a truly restless soul, his mind never at rest, and his actions follow his restless mind.

His creative impulse will not be stilled, and his aesthetic prods him to engage in an endless succession of initiatives each one of which changes in some manner the house in which we live.

It is, to begin with a house unlike its neighbours, built as an attempt to introduce a different kind of interior to the housing market. An interior designer went to work to produce his version of what was decades ago thought of as the open 'Florida' type interior. My husband liked the house because of its large, expansive walls, not because it was an open-concept home.

And as soon as we moved into our new house back in 1991, he set about transforming the open look of the house, to a conventional closed one. Which meant that where there were no separating walls, he installed one, even if it was comprised of a group of stationary glass doors; the 'open' look was still there in spirit, but each room was separated from the next one, an appearance that we both preferred.

And while he was about it, he began to design stained glass windows. Eventually, over the years, most of the windows in the house were covered with stained glass. And eventually, most of the doors in the house were exchanged for those my husband built himself and filled with stained glass. It was a process that people found intriguing and often commented on.

Yesterday morning when Margaret, who lives on the street behind us, walked by, we stopped and chatted as usual. We've been acquainted for years, she's a dear, frail little old thing. She expressed an interest in the windows and we invited her in. After her tour as we saw her out the door, she leaned toward my husband and confided that she wouldn't tell a soul what she had seen.