Category: phase 1

Chronicling my adventures restoring and updating a quirky old Philadelphia rowhouse

4th Anniversary Tour – Back Bedroom

The back bedroom, oh my. At the start it was tiny, the floor had a terrible slant (normally I’m okay with crooked floors but this was too much), and the closet was once again 12 inches deep. Let’s not forget the horror story of the wall behind the radiator. Whoever did this can’t have been…
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4 Year Anniversary Tour – Moving the Bathroom

This was the thing that officially blew up my schedule and budget. When I bought the house the bathroom was cheaply built and a little small and awkward, but really not bad for a house this size. The plan, of course, was to keep it. At least for a little while. But this bathroom was…
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4th Anniversary Tour – Living Room

This was the first room I worked on. Of course it didn’t look too bad at the start.     I got talked into the exposed brick on the stairway side and thought that this was going to nearly double what I had to do before moving in. Of course I doubled the scope several more times…
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A 4 Year Anniversary Tour

Yep, it’s been 4 years! Or it will be this month. And since it’s an awful lot to wade through all the Phase 1 work, I’ve decided to do it room by room. And that means the only place to start is my closet-sized vestibule. But first, a bit of background. I believe that my…
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The Great Soap Dish Dilemma

I’m taking a break from expensive and time consuming projects, but there are smaller things I should be doing. My roommate has been away for 3 weeks and I promised her that stuff would happen while she was gone. I didn’t follow through. Some of this is dependent on the Irishman, who also promised to…
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This concludes Phase 1

And I didn’t even notice! Which is funny because I’ve been fixated on the end for a solid 3 years now. And it was 3 years of scope bloat. At first it was the things I needed to make the place safe, like this chimney. (This is behind my bookcases in April 2014) To the “while…
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April Fools! And yay for organized storage!

First of all, that last post was totally fake. Maybe my April Fools jokes are too subtle, but if you may notice that I did many, many things that were not cost effective to try to preserve or recreate my house’s character, and the facade is the very last thing I would want to modernize.…
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