Chronicling my adventures restoring and updating a quirky old Philadelphia rowhouse
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…
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It’s been hectic people. The last time I updated the blog I was frantic to finish painting the exterior trim and my parents gave up an entire weekend to save me. Since then this stuff has happened: Got all the construction stuff put away and thoroughly cleaned the house. Had my mother and grandmother in…
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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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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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Remember that project to turn my room at my parents’ house into my dad’s office? Yep, they got him to help. Now you might be wondering what they were thinking after all I went through. Are they totally out of their minds? Maybe, but maybe it made sense. They sold the desk and wanted a counter that…
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All right, the dust has settled in my brain and been (mostly) cleaned out of my living room. Where does this leave us? Well, the kitchen looks more or less finished! Big sigh! So let’s talk about what I’ve got and why. Painted slab doors. I was emphatic that the kitchen be plain. I wanted…
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There’s not much room for surprises in a high-rise condo with concrete ceilings, is there? Not much, but there’s some. Remember how I said the carpeting was beat and grimy? It turns out that the padding under it had also hardened into some strange mealy substance that was stuck to the floors and had to…
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My dad came today and we got the lower part of the stairway wall primed! Old house purists: before you bite my head off for painting my woodwork, the first floor interior is a Colonial Revival style remodel from the 1930’s and had always been painted. But getting it back to this point seemed insurmountable.…
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Upstairs, the house had the original Victorian trim. I was kinda thrilled to have unique woodwork in not 1 but 2 unique styles. Sadly, almost half of it was missing or butchered, I made changes that required more, and what did survive I couldn’t get off the walls unbroken. So out it went and I…
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Amid all the odds and ends and this goal to not work too hard on the house, I’ve been chipping away at the dreaded clutter. And there were some pleasant surprises. First, I had some old kitchen cabinets in the basement but decided they won’t be reusable after all. I was ready to drive them…
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