Chronicling my adventures restoring and updating a quirky old Philadelphia rowhouse
This wasn’t part of the plan, but the dishwasher decided to turn itself into a dish rack in the middle of this project. And giving it a bit of thought, we decided that while we’re at it all the appliances should be stainless steel. As proud as I was of buying the opposite of what…
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Well, yes. working on the kitchen the last time around was miserable and I wanted to do as little as possible and get on with my life. But still. We’ve been living with woodwork that was just primed and then partly sanded off and marked up with the Irishman’s notes and further damaged from years…
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Hi everyone! It’s October and I’m writing my first post of the year. There’s been a lot of awfulness that I don’t want to write about this year, so I’ll just give you the bare minimum. My mother-in-law bought a house. We spent half of 2020 in Florida, mostly helping her. I have no love…
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At 960 square feet, the Crooked House is too small to have spaces that we don’t use regularly. Meanwhile, Tito and I both have demanding jobs and I have a soul-crushing commute and both of us would do well to have good space to work from home when we need it. That means a comfortable…
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So it’s been a bit, and what I’m about to write about is old. After we finished the bedroom, it might have been a good time to stop working for the holidays. But I was thinking about the unfinished state of the linen closet. I wanted to do it twice before, but life (as in…
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Well, we could call the room done, but we’re still having heating issues. So the same project that started early gets to finish late. Not my favorite job. And now for the good stuff. Getting the rug and all the paintings together made decorating the room a lot less intimidating. With the bookcases and the…
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Well, it’s been a grueling week and a half, but we’ve gotten some work done. You can probably see some unfinished details there. We still don’t have trim up on the left bookcase because I took the wrong piece of wood to my parents’ house and we ripped down a piece that’s too short. I…
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Remember how I said I’d put dowels in the wall for the picture rail? Well that’s the first thing I did since last week’s post. It really wasn’t hard! But it made a HUGE mess. I closed the door and walked away from this. So is that peak dirt? Not quite yet. I had 3…
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This is kind of a first for me, making my own built-in cabinets, even though what I’m doing isn’t that complicated. The first step was making a sketch. Although my drawing isn’t very good, it shows how every board fits together and how the whole thing fits into the drywall niche. I started with the…
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I jumped the gun on this project a little – and now I’m glad I did. We have too many travel plans for our own good this fall, I have a lot of DIY work to do, and some other jobs were harder to coordinate than I would have expected. First, I came to grips…
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