Chronicling my adventures restoring and updating a quirky old Philadelphia rowhouse
I own a 125-ish year old house that looked like only crackheads had worked on it before I bought it, so you know what kind of surprise I’m talking about. But before we get to that, a really long back story: I’ve always felt lukewarm about my front door (and I was doing mental backflips…
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The colors I showed last week were a good jumping off point. By the time I shared this, I was already pretty much sold on dark window sashes though. It’s a more historically accurate look that I might have been scared of 5 years ago, but now I’ve warmed up to it. Also, my boyfriend…
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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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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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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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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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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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The 6 posts I’ve now written just about planning work for the front of my house probably tipped you off to the fact that this project has me scared shitless. I’m definitely going for it, but as long as we’re getting freezing weather at night, repeatedly soaking the brick with water would be very…
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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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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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