Chronicling my adventures restoring and updating a quirky old Philadelphia rowhouse
Well, we could call the room done, but we’re still having heating issues. So the same project that started early gets to finish late. Not my favorite job. And now for the good stuff. Getting the rug and all the paintings together made decorating the room a lot less intimidating. With the bookcases and the…
Read more
Well, it’s been a grueling week and a half, but we’ve gotten some work done. You can probably see some unfinished details there. We still don’t have trim up on the left bookcase because I took the wrong piece of wood to my parents’ house and we ripped down a piece that’s too short. I…
Read more
Remember how I said I’d put dowels in the wall for the picture rail? Well that’s the first thing I did since last week’s post. It really wasn’t hard! But it made a HUGE mess. I closed the door and walked away from this. So is that peak dirt? Not quite yet. I had 3…
Read more
This is kind of a first for me, making my own built-in cabinets, even though what I’m doing isn’t that complicated. The first step was making a sketch. Although my drawing isn’t very good, it shows how every board fits together and how the whole thing fits into the drywall niche. I started with the…
Read more
I jumped the gun on this project a little – and now I’m glad I did. We have too many travel plans for our own good this fall, I have a lot of DIY work to do, and some other jobs were harder to coordinate than I would have expected. First, I came to grips…
Read more
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…
Read more
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…
Read more
The front bedroom is the least changed room in the house. To start, it had a crazy 1-foot-deep closet and a door connecting it to the middle bedroom, which is now the bathroom. So there was enough of the middle bedroom left over to get me a good closet, but I needed a bigger door opening than…
Read more
Yep, I’m finally back onto doing stuff. All my upstairs doors are now stripped of paint! A few that were never painted still need their varnish stripped! How did I manage this so fast? I found a corner to cut. I’m not doing anything to the back sides of the sliding closet doors. They’ll remain…
Read more