How to Add a Windowsill Using Craft Wood

So, we have a kitchen sink. Delightfully, it’s a sink with a window above it. Just how lovey is it to be washing dishes and admiring the cheerful little plant resting on the windowsill? I wouldn’t know because our window had no windowsill! I can’t tell you how many times in the almost 5 years in this house I’ve gone to put something on the kitchen windowsill only to be disappointed when I remembered we don’t have one. Womp womp! So… I faked it! Here’s how to add a windowsill using craft wood if you are in the same, windowsill-less boat that I was in.

Just look at all the steps on this window frame. Putting anything on it was impossible.

The poor plants just want to be in the sunlight on the windowsill! But no. They’re next to the sink. Cluttering up my counter.

For a long time, I figured it would always be impossible to have a windowsill built onto this window until one day as I wandered through Michael’s looking for who-knows-what, I spotted the craft wood bin. After about a half-a-millisecond of rooting around in it, I realized I could make my windowsill. The wood wasn’t very expensive, so I grabbed a bunch of pieces of varying thicknesses. My brilliant plan was to stack them to fake a windowsill, like so:

You can see how the bottom piece sticks out farther than the top piece there. The amazing thing about the craft wood is it comes not only in a bunch of different thicknesses, but different widths, too (which is great, because so did all the pieces of my windowsill!). I had managed, on my first try, to randomly pick up the right pieces of wood to construct something like this:

(If you’re wondering, the little teacup planters are from Christmas tree shops. You can really find some gems there.) So far so good! I got really excited when I noticed the top piece slide perfectly underneath the window crank. But then the wood stuck out when it reached the middle divider of the window. Man oh MAN this window construction was killing me!

I pondered this for a few minutes. At first I thought about ripping a thin piece of wood to wiggle into that crack, but quickly dismissed that wild idea. Then I figured I could get a saw and cut a chunk out of the existing window divider and slide the wood in. I went downstairs to find this tiny little handsaw I thought we had only to discover we didn’t have one. I figured the windowsill was, once again, an impossibility. Enter: The Chisel! I notched out a little slit for the craft wood:

I find chiseling, like caulking, very satisfying. You have to go slow, but if you do and the results come out nice, it’s super exciting. And sliiiiide that right under there….

Hooray! Hurdle one, jumped! You may notice, like everything else in this house, the windowsill isn’t totally square. That’s okay. I got it “nearly there” and then faked the rest with spackle and paint. 🙂

Oh. LJ was supervising from his bouncy vantage point.

The dry fit was looking pretty good except for the edges. It won’t look like a true windowsill because it doesn’t wrap around to the edge of the window frame, but most people won’t notice that. But still, the craft wood lengths weren’t exactly perfect, so I wound up with some little spaces on the edges. I did a real hack job of cutting little pieces of wood to fill in the holes and I totally don’t even care! 😂

I glued everything in place and let it dry for a day before I nailed it. Since there was no way to clamp it, I didn’t want anything slipping around when I nailed it.

Then came the spackling. I spackled like CRAZY!

To finish it, I sanded down all the spackle, tack clothed and vacuumed to get the dust off, and then painted it with our trim paint. I did two coats, followed by a polyurethane in a semi-gloss. It was what we had on hand, so I just went with it, but I figured since it was near water it definitely needed a protective coating.

And there you have it folks, how to fake a windowsill! Look at that happy plant! 🙂