Last month, after a two-year delay, we finally had our newly crafted lunette windows installed.
When we bought our house nearly five years ago, it had three lunette windows. Well just two were intact, and those had most of their panels missing and replaced with clear glass. The third window, in the attic, was “recreated” by a former owner with plastic and spray paint.
We bought mahogany from a NC wood dealer, and a local craftsman Dan Wagner of Innovative Concepts spent much time carefully recreating these windows using the current ones as a pattern. We had glass cut for the windows at Stained Glass Associates in Knightdale, using a few remnants of the original glass for a match.
Then we painted the frames with oil-based paint to seal them. Now we had exact replicas of the original windows, with rock hard frames and new glass which matched the old in color and composition.
Our craftsman installed these over two weekends. The job involved crawling into an enclosed space on our porch filled with bees for one, crawling into a storage closet for another, and keeping balance while setting each one up and checking for symmetry and balance.
We chose the nonprofit Preservation Zebulon logo from these windows, since the lunette window is also seen throughout Eastern North Carolina in homes built from 1870 to 1920. The lunette is a half- moon shaped space filled with glass. The lunette window seen repeatedly in homes of this region is a stylized sunrise, with the bottom portion half circle representing the golden sun, and the four panels rising above it displaying stained glass rays of blue, green, red and purple, as the colors of the rainbow.
We are delighted with the results. Just one more step to bringing this house back to her former glory.
