Chronicling my adventures restoring and updating a quirky old Philadelphia rowhouse
We can breathe a big sigh! It’s been 4 months of early mornings and tedious work. But the brick probably hasn’t looked this good in 50 years. It looks extra good from a distance, but the cleaning didn’t get it completely perfect. I’d call this satisfactory, but if it’s feasible to do even better I’m…
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I went MIA for a bit, but now there’s a lot to tell you about. We’ll start with the stripping progress. It got to be a slog. As I got higher up on the facade, the paint got more and more stubborn. Plus, I had more rungs to climb in between dipping the roller in…
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Quick progress update. I’m still plugging away at the paint removal. We’re getting there. Now let’s look at the condition of the facade. This weekend I used the scary caustic stripper again and got MOST of the caked in white paint out of the marble. Some small dots remain. I could do it again to…
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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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It started off well enough. I got the 2 parking spots in front of my house! This is super important for not getting sued. And my dad found safety gear. This Tyvek suit is older than I am. It smells like garage. The plan was to start with a few test patches and take it…
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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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