Let there be light?

When last we left our excitable homeowner, she'd finished making the front foundation pretty.

Prettier.

Earlier in the day, I'd gotten it into my head that I wanted the concrete planter stand gone from the front of the house. There was only one, to the right of the door, it was kind of ugly, and if I was going to do something, I was was going to do it once and right.
At about 9:30 am, I got out my gloves and sledge hammer and started whaling away on the cube. It reminded me of the pads in the cemeteries where you'd put a cement urn for flowers. Considering I'd just helped my mom put flowers in just such urns, I had them on my mind. The center square was different than the rest, but I chalked it up to weathering with a long gone urn on top.

It didn't want to budge. At all.
I started putting some heft into it - my very best "I'm going to win that danged stuffed critter at the fair game" hammer blows. The center started to break up!

Progress!

I started to pull out the center pieces. It was coming out very... uniform.
Specifically square.
Almost as if the center had been poured after... the edges...
After pulling out about 4-6" of cement, I encountered sand. Lot of it. The sort of sand that felt sharp and masonry-like.
And in the sand was buried bricks.
I was hoping for treasure. (This house is wanting for treasure.)

It was at this point that something clicked in my brain. There's a funny window thing in the basement, small and square-ish and boarded over from the back.
Could it... was it... no...

Oh But Yes It Was.

At some point, after the granite step was put in, someone took the time to pour a window well for this one tiny window.
They didn't bother to pour the rest of the apron the seven or so feet to the corner of the house.
(Just a blob of a window well.)
Which then later someone else decided they didn't want any more, so they slapped a piece of 1/4" plywood behind the window, filled the void with grey cement bricks, poured a ton of sand over the bricks, and then iced this halfassed cake with cement.

Excavating the window well from the outside.
This is where I got half of the grey bricks I used for edging this side of the house, and the sand to sort of bed them.

Excavating the window well from the inside.
Shop vac to the rescue.

The frame for the window is shot. As you can see, it's gone on the bottom, and the sides are eaten/rotted almost all the way up.

This leaves me with a conundrum.
On one hand, it's nice to have natural light into that part of the basement. I'm sure that's what they were thinking at the time when they put it in. It can't be made bigger - on one side is the massive piece of front step granite, and on the other side is a massive piece of foundation granite that holds up the house.

On the other hand, while functional, the window well is ugly, and it's Right There. If it was more neatly poured, or not stuck to the front of the house like a concrete pimple, I'd probably just rebuild a window for the space and call it good.
But it's not somewhere else.

Eventually, I think I'm going to remove the window well, (or at least the top bit) find some stone, and close it up right, probably when I'm re-pointing the basement.
For now, I've got some of my super-handy roofing slates covering up the hole so that small mammals don't decide my home is their home.

I'll have to deal with it at some point before the winter.

The slate is almost exactly the right size to cover the hole.
Rodent, but not insect proof.