I’ve got two stained glass panels from the new house to renovate. They are potentially beautiful Victorian windows with some pretty painted sections, but various things have ruined them.

Firstly there are lots of breakages all over the place and some bright spark has used araldite to glue completely different pieces of glass over the cracks. Secondly there are some odd discrepancies, like painted pieces which don’t match in colour or style or positioning, or painted pieces that were clearly made for other areas of the panel and then repurposed. This hotchpotch may have been done by the original Victorian artist using old scraps of glass, but I suspect these panels have been rehashed since then as there is also glass in there that does not look Victorian to me. Thirdly the colour balance has been so messed around with that it’s actually difficult to see the original scheme. Annoyingly it appears that the remedial work done to it was so unprofessional that the results are worse than the original problem… this is beginning to sound much like our house itself, the building from which they were taken out.

Once they were removed from the building I looked at the state of the lead to see if I could work with it, but it was so battered up I decided to dismantle the panel completely and start again with just the original glass.