Prison Break

In the small bathroom off our second bedroom, is a window. It’s about, I dunno… maybe a foot, foot-and-a-half wide; two, three feet tall. It opens outward, so the screen’s on the inside.

At some point in the 104-year-old house’s history when the sketchiness of the neighborhood may have been the factor that led to the decision to bar all the windows on the first floor it was decided to bar this second floor window, too. This, despite its small size and inaccessible position about 15 feet up the south side of the house making it rank most likely last on a burglar’s list of entry options, probably below axing a hole in a wall.

My theory is that there was a tenant there with a child and it wasn’t done so much to keep criminals from coming in as it was to keep a kid or kids from falling out. But it’s just a theory, an attempt to explain such an inanity.

But regardless of the reason barred like a prison it was and barred like a prison it’s been, until this morning when the bars removal became one more item I was able to check off my never-ending To Do list:

Here’s the before and after:

I hate bars. The only ones that remain are the three that hang off the louvre windows on the first floor because, well… they’re louvre windows which we’ll one day replace and then those bars will be gone too.

And yeah, I took that silly sliding latch on the bottom off too. Totally unnecessary.