Chronicling my adventures restoring and updating a quirky old Philadelphia rowhouse
This was the first room I worked on. Of course it didn’t look too bad at the start. I got talked into the exposed brick on the stairway side and thought that this was going to nearly double what I had to do before moving in. Of course I doubled the scope several more times…
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Yep, it’s been 4 years! Or it will be this month. And since it’s an awful lot to wade through all the Phase 1 work, I’ve decided to do it room by room. And that means the only place to start is my closet-sized vestibule. But first, a bit of background. I believe that my…
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This isn’t what I meant… No, 2016 was my first time hosting holiday dinner, so I feel very grown up! And I decided to pretend to be Italian because I live in South Philly (even though my part is more southeast Asian than Italian now). I went all out and served the Seven Fishes…
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So yeah, I had a party! I had a post drafted about it but it was boring, so here’s the tl;dr version. I invited 120 people on Facebook. I panicked. I cooked for 30. 15 showed up. It was nice. I think the Crooked House could accommodate 20 or 25 comfortably for this kind of…
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I’m having a party today so of course I decided to paint the vestibule this week. It’s important to put off tidying up with as many messy projects as possible. This didn’t happen along with the rest of the house for a lot of reasons. Okay, mainly just one. I was sick of painting. Anyways,…
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First there was Tim. He was in the picture for a solid 2 years, and even though I had to put up with a lot of stupid shit I stuck with him. But he left me high and dry when a better option came along. I never gave him his stuff back. Then there was…
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2 big life changes since the beer tour. First, I’ve been eating those vegetables for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day. And second, the joy of NOT working on the house isn’t strong enough to get me to shrug off certain glaringly unfinished pieces anymore. An aside, the Philly shrug is an important part of…
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I bet you want to know how the tour/party went, but first one of the last things I did to clean for it. In contrast to what I talked about hearing from my steps last week, the steps themselves wasn’t white enough. It used to be a thing that everyone would scrub their marble steps…
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I write about problems like my terror of having the back exterior stuccoed in a texture that doesn’t look old. Sure, there are real problems that I care about, but there’s always someone who knows more about them than I do. And aside from what I know well enough to write about it, avoiding controversy…
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I’m gonna be on a house tour! Or actually better than that, a beer tour. This one will be especially interesting because the whole group moves from house to house on a schedule. That means I can expect about 70 people. And remember, this room is basically the whole house. So this should be interesting.…
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