Category: Bedrooms

Chronicling my adventures restoring and updating a quirky old Philadelphia rowhouse

Let’s talk about paint colors – starting upstairs

All of them! The truth is, I have little idea of what I want. I could stick with white walls. Sometimes that looks great. But I kind of don’t want my house to look like it was rehabbed on spec. I think I want a slightly subdued off white on my ceilings and trim. Not quite the bright…
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Seasons change and so does my work

I’ve decided to move the end of summer back to sometime in the past week. It’s been warm and that lines up the change in seasons with big shifts in my house. This shift feels like a bit of a cleanse, as the piles of junk and mess are starting to shrink. Everything about how…
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Upstairs: Floored!

Yep, as of today, they’re done! (pretty much.) And some fun things had to happen for this. After I got to a certain point in the room, I didn’t have enough boards that were the same width to run the length of the room, so I was coming up really, really short. Off to the…
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Drumroll please… a big milestone this week!

My plumber’s been in! That’s right, I have a working bathroom! Now it’s not all good news. Apparently I wasn’t supposed to tile all the way up to the valve, so my plumber got to have fun chipping out my work to make the trim piece fit. And he couldn’t make the one I wanted…
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Upstairs Floors Post 5: You Can Walk Everywhere Now

So you saw last time that my floor patches were kind of terrifyingly unsupported because it looked better that way. After I wrote that my dad and I fixed the problem by putting subflooring up from the living room. Yep, fun job. Before that could happen, out came the old gas light lines.

Upstairs Floors Post 3: Now there’s something to see

So I ended my hiatus this weekend. Yesterday very little happened and I started to brace myself for a VERY slow process to finish this job, but today it actually looks different! So first I planned ahead. The floors in my house were installed without a subfloor, so every floorboard joint is over a joist. I…
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Upstairs Floors Post 2: Dragging my feet is my favorite pastime

Bad news, I don’t have anything to show you. I’ve been taking it easy, but also pondering. Because I need lots of time to do that every time I take on something complicated. So if you want visuals, you can watch what I’m watching. Note: there are a lot of videos just like this. I’ve…
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Planning ahead, to the flooring and beyond!

I feel like I’ve turned another corner with the house. I’ve constantly had to do bits and pieces of things all over the house to be ready for one contractor after another. I’ve started low priority things during downtime and not finished them. And I ended up spending half the summer siding the cantilever. Which…
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