Chronicling my adventures restoring and updating a quirky old Philadelphia rowhouse
So you saw last time that my floor patches were kind of terrifyingly unsupported because it looked better that way. After I wrote that my dad and I fixed the problem by putting subflooring up from the living room. Yep, fun job. Before that could happen, out came the old gas light lines.
Flooring progress has been slow and mostly more of the same. I decided to take out a few more damaged floorboards in the front bedroom; we’re better at it now. And reinforcing them from below, a two person job, hasn’t started yet. Instead, I did a floor reinstallation dry run in the back bedroom to…
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So I ended my hiatus this weekend. Yesterday very little happened and I started to brace myself for a VERY slow process to finish this job, but today it actually looks different! So first I planned ahead. The floors in my house were installed without a subfloor, so every floorboard joint is over a joist. I…
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Bad news, I don’t have anything to show you. I’ve been taking it easy, but also pondering. Because I need lots of time to do that every time I take on something complicated. So if you want visuals, you can watch what I’m watching. Note: there are a lot of videos just like this. I’ve…
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I feel like I’ve turned another corner with the house. I’ve constantly had to do bits and pieces of things all over the house to be ready for one contractor after another. I’ve started low priority things during downtime and not finished them. And I ended up spending half the summer siding the cantilever. Which…
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OK, I’m exaggerating. Some of the comforts of home. I now have cleaning supplies under my (temporary) bathroom sink.Yep, I’m moving up in the world! My mom bought me all this stuff for a different bathroom. Remember it? It’s part of the back bedroom now. It was small and awkward and poorly built and had…
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I wanted to be different than my parents. I said I wouldn’t give my life over to keeping a perfect house like theirs. I said buying a small rowhouse with no land would accomplish this. I said I was going to decorate differently than my mom. Maybe I will. But the most deep rooted, primal…
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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.