Chronicling my adventures restoring and updating a quirky old Philadelphia rowhouse
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
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…
Read more
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…
Read more
We don’t really have a porch, but that’s the best name we’ve got for the underside of the cantilever out back. This project has been on hold for years, so here’s a recap: When I bought the place the bay was crudely stuccoed and the underside of it was clad in that faux rustic textured…
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