Chronicling my adventures restoring and updating a quirky old Philadelphia rowhouse
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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Like I said before, I want the stucco to wrap around the corner where the downspout hides the ugly control joint. But there’s a problem. The cast iron pipe connecting my downspout to the sewer angles in toward the house so the top is right up against it. It’s original to the house (1890’s) and…
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So I’ve had a pattern. Do project, burn out, take time off, start 2 new projects. I was around that point in the cycle 2 weeks ago and, well, it was pretty obvious that sooner or later I need to finish painting the kitchen cabinets, get the knobs on, and get glass in the doors.…
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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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Get your minds out of the gutter, folks. I’m talking about painting of course! That shirt’s really taken a beating. Mostly because the back of my house has all kinds of awkward tight spaces. You’ve probably seen before that I needed to hop the property line to lean a ladder against the side of the…
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This is probably the last you’ll see of my siding before the back side is really done. My agonizing over paint colors is done and culminated in going with the ballsiest suggestion I got, painting the siding (a slightly grayed out) navy blue. One criticism this idea got was that it would make my house…
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Well first of all, some good news: my roofer came and finished my fascia! Yay! And now some bad news: I’m unimpressed with how it looks.
That’s right, I started off with talking about pretty things, but I’m gonna go through the back story before we talk about paint colors. Skip to the bottom if you want. Making the back pretty (for real) is my next step! The bay on the back of the house is also the part of the…
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Not Christmas, thank God. I’ll take the summer for now. Instead of garlands, we’re hanging clapboards. And they look good! Hardieplank, just like any wood siding, goes in from the bottom up. And to start it you need a shim so that the first board slopes out properly. After that each board laps over the…
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