Chronicling my adventures restoring and updating a quirky old Philadelphia rowhouse
How bratty am I allowed to be? I spent a lot of time complaining about not making progress. Now? I’m going to complain about too much. Why? Because things have been a frenzy. I wanted a break after the patio door. Instead, the Irishman stepped into my house and said, “We should Sheetrock the living…
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So before the patio door was going in I was starting to get junk out of the living room and restore some level of order to the house. Then that whirlwind of a week getting the door in a week sooner than I expected, and suddenly HOLYCRAPHOWDIDTHISHAPPEN???? The good news is it’s going away quickly.…
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Yep, my neighbor was right. We did it in a day! (With the help of 5 evenings of prep.) It went well. The brick was in good shape but easy to cut. It was easy to square the sub sill. And it looks amazing. But let’s start at the beginning. The first step to tearing…
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I’ve wanted to put in this patio door all along for the light and a better kitchen layout. But actually spending money on it scared me. I started getting estimates, and then my next door neighbor, who is a master carpenter, offered to do it with me and my dad at a big discount. I…
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Yes, you read right. The last week and a half has been a drywalling blitz. It upset me terrible not to mention this in the last post, but there’s so much visible stuff going on I we needed a post taking the long view. As of now, the back bedroom is done! My roommate’s moved…
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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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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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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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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.
Flooring progress has been slow and mostly more of the same. I decided to take out a few more damaged floorboards in the front bedroom; we’re better at it now. And reinforcing them from below, a two person job, hasn’t started yet. Instead, I did a floor reinstallation dry run in the back bedroom to…
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