Chronicling my adventures restoring and updating a quirky old Philadelphia rowhouse
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…
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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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Upstairs, the house had the original Victorian trim. I was kinda thrilled to have unique woodwork in not 1 but 2 unique styles. Sadly, almost half of it was missing or butchered, I made changes that required more, and what did survive I couldn’t get off the walls unbroken. So out it went and I…
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The kitchen looked clean and usable, but surprise surprise, I salvaged nothing from it. The cabinets were glued to the walls and many didn’t survive being taken down. There were 7 vinyl floors installed in this room! 7! Once I was at this point, the single wall layout with no workspace wasn’t going to cut…
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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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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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No that’s definitely not true. My parents are turning my childhood bedroom into my dad’s office. My dad has been working from home for several years now, and usually he helps himself to the kitchen table, which is driving my mom crazy. Especially because he sometimes takes conference calls around 5pm and everyone has to be quiet.…
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This isn’t what I meant… No, 2016 was my first time hosting holiday dinner, so I feel very grown up! And I decided to pretend to be Italian because I live in South Philly (even though my part is more southeast Asian than Italian now). I went all out and served the Seven Fishes…
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So yeah, I had a party! I had a post drafted about it but it was boring, so here’s the tl;dr version. I invited 120 people on Facebook. I panicked. I cooked for 30. 15 showed up. It was nice. I think the Crooked House could accommodate 20 or 25 comfortably for this kind of…
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I’m having a party today so of course I decided to paint the vestibule this week. It’s important to put off tidying up with as many messy projects as possible. This didn’t happen along with the rest of the house for a lot of reasons. Okay, mainly just one. I was sick of painting. Anyways,…
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