Category: Crooked House Renovation

Chronicling my adventures restoring and updating a quirky old Philadelphia rowhouse

Can we talk about paint colors yet?

I’ve been holding out on you. I had some paint color ideas sketched into the Sherwin Williams Color Visualizer that I never bothered to show you in 5 years. But now that I’m pretty sure the brick will be unpainted we may as well have a look. But first, some of what I wanted to do:…
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Turning a Corner With Stripping

I’ve been in the habit of doing one task at a time to the whole house. This made sense when I was trying to be ready for ALL the plumbing, wiring, insulation contracting, drywall finishing, and floor finishing at once to get better prices from tradesmen. It made less sense when I decided to go…
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Losing the Stripping Battle… For now

It started off well enough. I got the 2 parking spots in front of my house! This is super important for not getting sued. And my dad found safety gear. This Tyvek suit is older than I am. It smells like garage. The plan was to start with a few test patches and take it…
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Pandora’s Box? No, Best Day!

Sunday was the big day. The project I’ve been waiting 5 years to start. The great reversal of architectural vandalism. We had to work from the bottom up. The giant awning downstairs made it impossible to access anything above it, including window glass (ew). Looking at the giant awning from underneath, I could see 3…
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Un-Capping the Windows

Viewer discretion advised: this post contains graphic images of architectural violence. I was too impatient to wait until the weekend to start peeling off the low-maintenance downgrades my house got. The capping was a job I could take on myself. I actually bent a little bit of it back years ago and left it that…
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What to Do About the Windows

After I’ve restored my brick front, it will be time to replace the windows. I’ve been looking forward to their demise for a long time Let’s have fun exploring exactly how bad they are. The top few inches of the openings are built down with haphazardly stacked-up boards. Then the window jambs are racked so…
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Outside Updates

My time this week went to some much needed filing, not to stuff you’d want to read about. But I did do something with the front of my house. I stuck my head out the window. That’s not much, but I haven’t looked too closely at the upper half of the brick what with a 13-foot-wide…
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Catching You Up on the Facade

If you’ve been with me for a while, you might recall that I wrote a mini-dissertation on my plans to restore the facade in Summer 2016. Here it is, if you want to read these old posts again: Existing Conditions A Cornice Vocabulary Primer How not to restore historic masonry In With Old Windows? But…
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5 years!

This year has kind of felt like a slog. But when we look back to where the house was a year ago, I think we have cause for optimism. Can you spot the changes? I’m excited about having the table set. That means Year 6 is starting out right. But back to last year… I…
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Back To Work, On Storage

Did you miss me? I took a solid 2 months off working on the house and that’s been really great. In fact, I haven’t been this social in 6 years, before I bought the place. Relatedly, I decided to reorganize the kitchen cabinets. Partially because some of them are a disorganized mess and partly to…
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