Woman creates bright home that reflects her Wyoming past

Irene Broderick’s 1920 brick home in Priest River, Idaho, features one very special claim to distinction – a unique window in the top half of her kitchen door. The door opens into an enclosed back porch that Broderick calls her “Wyoming Room.” Broderick designed the window frame herself with the help of a craftsman in Sandpoint, who then fashioned it out of 30 colorful, hand-painted glass slides from the 1940s. Like the memorabilia that highlight the Wyoming Room, Broderick brought the advertising slides with her in 2002 when, after 32 years, she moved from Dubois, Wyo.,

to be near her son and granddaughter.

Each slide advertises a Dubois business in bright colors. The design was painted on one side of a piece of glass that was then sealed to another piece with tape so that the design is inside.

Broderick says she spotted the slides years ago in a box in what had been the projection room of an old movie theater located in a popular log tavern in Dubois. The owner of the building noticed her interest and told her, “If you want them, take them,” she explained. “I was always attracted to anything that had something to do with local history.”

Busy “raising kids and teaching school,” she didn’t do anything with the slides for a long time, “but I kept them and lugged them to Idaho,” she said. A neighbor told her about a Sandpoint artist who teaches stained glass classes, and Broderick sought her out to help her decide on a use for the slides.

“She was very fascinated,” Broderick said. The two of them decided to frame a small window.

According to Internet research, painting such slides was how Walt Disney broke into the movie business, Broderick added. Since the slides can be harmed by direct sunlight, the window was installed where no bright light can penetrate.

The window is just one of the features that makes Broderick’s house exceptional. A lover of color, she troweled the kitchen walls with a thick layer of “old-fashioned farmhouse red Venetian plaster paint.” She had three-part windows on the south side of the room lowered, painted the woodwork white, and installed a shiny stainless steel ceiling overhead “in order to bounce around all the light that I could.”

The same material, patterned to resemble an old stamped tin ceiling, was used on the backsplashes that run from stove to sink under the cabinets. The double-drain board sink from the 1940s is one Broderick found at Brown’s salvage in Spokane. The new electric range looks exactly like an old wood-burning stove with double warming ovens.

The kitchen’s north wall holds 7-inch-wide wooden shelves that Broderick designed to hold condiments and other brightly packaged food items like Jell-O and powdered puddings. “I like to show off the colors,” she said.

Broderick’s creativity and love of old things are evident throughout her home. In creating a cozy retirement nest for herself, she says she has tried to emulate the words of David Grayson.

“Give me time enough here in this place and I will surely make a beautiful thing.”