Chronicling my adventures restoring and updating a quirky old Philadelphia rowhouse
It’s been a little while, and the work I’ve done lately has been thankless. I decided to tear out my 3 layer thick living room ceiling, 2 layer thick kitchen ceiling, and the ceiling and walls in the wood framed parts of the back bedroom. Here’s what that looks like. Don’t be scared.
I planned for this to be at least somewhat instructional, but the video got mangled and came out extra fast. All the better for you, I cut all the educational parts out. Michael Bay’s got nothing on me, here’s 47 efficient seconds of smashing action!
Five men and a tub. The big news for the past two weeks is, we got all 325 pounds of it up the stairs. And no one died, and as far as I know, none of them hate me. I love love love this tub. This is probably less exciting than I think it is.…
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Update: I’ve concluded that separating one of my sinks from the bathroom (and keeping it open to the upstairs hall instead) will not work in the space I have. It may have been handy, but I’ll be sticking with a fairly conventional bathroom with two sinks. Continue reading if you want to see my thoughts…
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Ok, I’m not roughing it; as long as I am with my parents I live in the lap of luxury. My plumber has finished roughing IN. I have a new bathtub in the living room and there are pipes running through to where all my plumbing fixtures are going to go. Other than that, I’ve…
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So in this post I’m gonna write some nasty things about work that was previously done to my house, and I want to set a little ground rule that we’re not using my blog to mock other people’s taste. I was in the neighborhood with some friends this week and I made a snide comment…
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I’ve always been a snob about things like this; when I was about 6 years old I told my parents that I was tired of the “standard” woodwork in our Cape Cod style house. Twenty years later, I got it in my head that a little surviving charm made buying a non-rehabbed house worth all…
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The soot I’ve found inside my walls is a fun reminder of why spring cleaning used to be an important yearly chore. I don’t have too much soot to deal with, though, so I need something else to clear out. Coincidentally, I’ve also decided that my house’s floor plan could use some improvement. I have…
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Yes, the new starts today were in the kitchen, but before I get to that, here are a few pictures of the finished exposed brick. You can see that the plaster came off more cleanly in some places than others, but I like it that way.
My house is in pretty solid condition, but was unfortunately the victim to some pretty badly done renovations, apparently right before it went on the market. The worst of these was the disastrous floor finishing job that I’ll have to re-redo later on. Then the walls were covered in loose wallpaper, and instead of scraping…
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