Chronicling my adventures restoring and updating a quirky old Philadelphia rowhouse
Remember that project to turn my room at my parents’ house into my dad’s office? Yep, they got him to help. Now you might be wondering what they were thinking after all I went through. Are they totally out of their minds? Maybe, but maybe it made sense. They sold the desk and wanted a counter that…
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All right, the dust has settled in my brain and been (mostly) cleaned out of my living room. Where does this leave us? Well, the kitchen looks more or less finished! Big sigh! So let’s talk about what I’ve got and why. Painted slab doors. I was emphatic that the kitchen be plain. I wanted…
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So here’s the deal. Yes, the HDF was kitchen cabinet doors. I’ve been told that it is a suitable material for cabinetry. I hope I was told right. And the rest of the deal. What I said about being burnt out from tedious work and a messy house was true. I was absolutely ready to…
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A quick note: It’s been an exhausting couple of weeks. I should have published this about 2 weeks ago on April 8. I present it to you now as if I had. It’s been a tedious month. We left off with the banister and the paneling below looking more or less like this. The sequence was…
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I had goals of fiscal responsibility. Finance the renovation completely out of pocket. And when that failed, pay off the credit card while it’s still interest free. And when that failed, transfer the balance. It seemed like my scheme to give the banks $0 of interest payments was gonna work. And then I had to…
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There’s not much room for surprises in a high-rise condo with concrete ceilings, is there? Not much, but there’s some. Remember how I said the carpeting was beat and grimy? It turns out that the padding under it had also hardened into some strange mealy substance that was stuck to the floors and had to…
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My dad came today and we got the lower part of the stairway wall primed! Old house purists: before you bite my head off for painting my woodwork, the first floor interior is a Colonial Revival style remodel from the 1930’s and had always been painted. But getting it back to this point seemed insurmountable.…
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I’m having a problem in WordPress – most of my pages are all fine when I edit them but don’t show up when I publish and I can’t figure out why. The house tour can stay broken for now, but the h. Studs too short? Cut blocks of wood and/or stack up scraps of plywood to…
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I’m sorry my last post ended so suspensefully. Here’s the best material I’ve got from the condo, so I hope this makes up for it. To start, my parents (sometimes with my help) made some decisions about the kitchen to just get it done: The cabinets, countertops, and appliances all came from Home Depot. There…
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We’re going back about 8 years. My mom had wanted my grandmother to downsize for about as long as I can remember, but come hell or high water, Nana was staying put. In fact, she complained constantly that it was too small. She was 40 minutes away (without traffic), had to carry her laundry up 2…
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