Chronicling my adventures restoring and updating a quirky old Philadelphia rowhouse
Then comes restoring the brick, and this job is scary. I’m going to take the paint off my brick. Many sources recommend avoiding this as it can damage the substrate, but you saw what the paint looks like on my house. For further reading, I suggest this piece from the National Park Service, the preservation guidelines…
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The first day of façade work is gonna be fun. I’ll triumphantly rip down the awnings, the capping around the windows, and the siding over the cornice. This will wait until after there is no danger of frost, probably next spring. All façade work including the brick and windows will then need to be done…
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I wouldn’t call my endeavors to get rid of junk and catch up with routine cleaning blog worthy, at least not yet. So now seems like a good time to get back to what I really like writing about – obsessively scrutinizing old details and making fairly technical restoration plans. So to start, here’s the…
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We’re going back to a time before blogging and progress photos were a thing. Mother’s Day 2011 that is. The photos are from last year’s redo but they get the point across. My mom had always wanted a small fountain or pond and after considering a few different spots, we decided that a kind of…
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Amid all the odds and ends and this goal to not work too hard on the house, I’ve been chipping away at the dreaded clutter. And there were some pleasant surprises. First, I had some old kitchen cabinets in the basement but decided they won’t be reusable after all. I was ready to drive them…
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It’s pretty weird to write about this at all – since it has nothing to do with me at all. But it was kind of a fun project. The deal is, my parents have always liked bulbs but haven’t gotten around to planting them. Which is a shame because they have a zoysia lawn that’s…
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And I didn’t even notice! Which is funny because I’ve been fixated on the end for a solid 3 years now. And it was 3 years of scope bloat. At first it was the things I needed to make the place safe, like this chimney. (This is behind my bookcases in April 2014) To the “while…
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This reminded my mom of that terrible old show where women would tell their tale of woe and the one with the saddest story would win stuff. Can you guess why? It’s not because my life is impressively sad. No, it has something to do with my washer and dryer. And the big priority was…
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First of all, that last post was totally fake. Maybe my April Fools jokes are too subtle, but if you may notice that I did many, many things that were not cost effective to try to preserve or recreate my house’s character, and the facade is the very last thing I would want to modernize.…
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