When we bought this house that is our home 26 years ago it held all the features that my husband wanted in a retirement home which goes a long way to explaining why it is he set about transforming it from an 'open' interior on the ground floor to a comparmentalized one, installing glass 'walls' of separation, ripping out countertops in kitchen and bathrooms and rebuilding them, installing doors where there were none before, replacing floor coverings with ceramic and marble tiles -- (sourced from China and inexpensive at that time -- as they no longer are).

Although one of the important features of this house to us was its placement, adjacent a forested ravine, we live across from the ravine, not on it as do the houses across the street from ours, so the views from our windows, front and back, are those of other houses, not that of the forest, though we can see tree masts rising above neighbourhood roofs. To my husband, living in such close proximity to other houses is akin to living in a 'tenement' city.

And so, gradually over the years, my husband transformed those views. There are many large windows in this house of ours and most of them now have landscapes reflecting his imagination, for he has created glass panoramas of gardens and forests that arrest our attention. Some of the windows are built directly onto the existing house windows, and others have been inserted into shutters that swing open and shut over the existing windows.

Only at the front of the house looking out onto the street we live on where the windows of the two front bedrooms are, no stained glass windows have been inserted. But that is destined to change, to reflect the window treatment in the rest of the house windows. Shutter frames have been built and installed over the two windows in one of the bedrooms. A lot of thought and discussion has gone into what kind of landscapes we wanted, and a miniature cartoon made, then remade into a full-size cartoon to be transformed into glass panels.

The work is underway. It is time-consuming and sometimes it can be boring, but the end result is what is important. There are many pieces to this jigsaw puzzle of a stained glass window. Over 400 pieces for each of the panes, so it will take time for the first of four panels to be completed. And, we hope, to our satisfaction. But judging from past such enterprises, there is little doubt that too will be achieved.