The Post

D Vautier
8/2015


We live in the Lake Hills area east of Bellevue, WA.  By the late 50s Lake Hills went through a period or rapid development so most of the houses are around 60 years old.  Many of these houses were built by Gonzales Construction Co. and they all have rather striking similarities mainly in the design of roofs and basements, windows and porches.  There were houses on the upslope and houses built on the downslope because the terrain was very sloped anyway.  Altogether there were about eight basic designs and over the years each house has been modified and updated with different landscaping done so no two houses are very much the same anymore.  Ours is a downslope house so we enjoy a better view and good water runoff but just about everything in our house has changed.

So finally we decided to get our last original window replaced and had several contractors look at replacement cost.  This was a long window with what appeared to be a post in the middle.  We wanted to replace this with two tempered glass picture windows each with half sliders.  The area around the post could be framed off with the two replacement windows on either side of the post.  However none of the contractors had seen anything like this kind of post before and didn’t know what to expect.

here is the outside

and here is the post

When we ordered the windows and began to remove the window the post was actually built into the frame.  That was a surprise to us.  I could have designed two equal size windows and put a post in the middle.  But then what we finally got looked pretty good after all.