Chronicling my adventures restoring and updating a quirky old Philadelphia rowhouse
For anyone who is new to this blog, welcome! I’m excited to participate in the One Room Challenge for my first and (in this house) last time. So far, I’ve been more of a tear the whole house apart and live in chaos and filth for years kind of a guy. The front bedroom is…
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I’ve had a little bit of clutter in the back yard pretty much nonstop since I bought the house. Occasionally while I was working there was a lot of clutter. Now I’m down to a small stack of Belgian blocks back behind where I keep the grill and trash cans. Also, the dirt on the…
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Where we left off, the level siding didn’t meet up at all with the crooked original beadboard. So after all that trouble making the siding normal and level for the neighbors to see, now I wanted to move the weird part where things don’t match up into their view and out of mine. So…
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We don’t really have a porch, but that’s the best name we’ve got for the underside of the cantilever out back. This project has been on hold for years, so here’s a recap: When I bought the place the bay was crudely stuccoed and the underside of it was clad in that faux rustic textured…
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My mom told me that she did this wrong. She got rugs last and then scrupulously searched for rugs whose every hint of color matched what was already in the room. Worse, she roped me into helping with this. So I’ve thought the bedroom needed a rug, and it seems like a good place to…
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First of, how was Puerto Rico? It was really great. I don’t know what to say about it so I’ll leave you with some pictures. Back to cold Pennsylvania and the shutters. We’ve been leaning the lower tiers against the windows for privacy while I procrastinated on the uppers. So I laid them out in…
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6 years ago today I bought the Crooked House. 3 years ago (not quite to the day) I finished my 6-month renovation and moved in. In Year 6, I finally faced my fear of the facade and took it on. At the start, I was afraid to take the awnings down. The windows were horribly…
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So far, I haven’t done much. In the 1920’s or 30’s someone redid all the woodwork downstairs and put deep sills right over the original 19th Century sills. I stripped these, trimmed them to fit in the slightly modified openings, and added little blocks of wood to get them level. Look how crooked the original…
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The first time I drooled over pocket shutters was, I think, at the Winterthur Museum when I was about 5. So naturally, when I found evidence suggesting the Crooked House originally had them, I was hoping for a way to recreate them. But I figured I could never justify the price of having them made…
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