We bought our house, unfinished, from a couple in Buenos Aires who built it for a dozen years, finally splitting before they had a chance to live in it. Because of their distance (3 hours) and big-city mindset, they had the whole place swathed in rejas – bars, even going so far as to have two locks on every door.
The discordance of the bars with the width of the custom-made wooden window panes gnaws at me aesthetically.
Worse (or better), many houses in our neighborhood have identical windows – and no rejas. Do we need them at all?
Envisioning a solar convection heater for our chilly upstairs bathroom, I borrowed a grinder yesterday and removed the bars from one bathroom window. And then the other. And then two over non-opening windows high in our stairwell. Each is held in place by a tack weld on the head of four lag bolts. Lots of noise and sparks, but in fact relatively little cutting before the bolt will unscrew.
I’m tempted to keep going – the kitchen (above) would be so much nicer without the prison feel. But isn’t it foolish to remove a security feature?
Or is it foolish to live with prison bars because of another person’s fears?
