Chronicling my adventures restoring and updating a quirky old Philadelphia rowhouse
Whelp, fall showed up this week. And remember how I never finished spray foaming the windows? Well, Tito was watching TV and said, “Babe, these windows are drafty!” So I had to fix that STAT. And light the boiler. Thankfully, this year started differently than past ones in that the heat works and making it…
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This isn’t the same kind of a surprise as I found under the basement stairs. I’m lucky enough to live near LimeWorks, which might be THE place to go for historic, non-Portland cement based masonry products and techniques in the United States. They’ve recommended a number of things for restoring my facade, starting with making…
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That’s right, everything is picked out now! A few weeks ago when I was getting neurotic deciding whether or not the windows should have muntins like I originally planned, or not like the house was originally, Tito looked confused about why this even mattered because he didn’t think it would look that different. Blog readers…
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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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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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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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My time this week went to some much needed filing, not to stuff you’d want to read about. But I did do something with the front of my house. I stuck my head out the window. That’s not much, but I haven’t looked too closely at the upper half of the brick what with a 13-foot-wide…
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If you’ve been with me for a while, you might recall that I wrote a mini-dissertation on my plans to restore the facade in Summer 2016. Here it is, if you want to read these old posts again: Existing Conditions A Cornice Vocabulary Primer How not to restore historic masonry In With Old Windows? But…
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You’ve seen a lot that needs to stay in this house. What needs to change? The kitchen. Now, in the 20 or so years since I’ve first seen this I’ve come around to steel cabinets and chrome dinette sets. Retro Renovation often features people who send them out to auto body shops or powder coaters. But…
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Back in imagination land, there are a lot of details on this house that (to me) absolutely cannot change – or have to be changed back – and some of that will be hard. But I like hard. So let’s start at the top. The roof is terra cotta tile glazed green. There are fancy…
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