Chronicling my adventures restoring and updating a quirky old Philadelphia rowhouse
So here’s the deal. Yes, the HDF was kitchen cabinet doors. I’ve been told that it is a suitable material for cabinetry. I hope I was told right. And the rest of the deal. What I said about being burnt out from tedious work and a messy house was true. I was absolutely ready to…
Read more
A quick note: It’s been an exhausting couple of weeks. I should have published this about 2 weeks ago on April 8. I present it to you now as if I had. It’s been a tedious month. We left off with the banister and the paneling below looking more or less like this. The sequence was…
Read more
The front bedroom is the least changed room in the house. To start, it had a crazy 1-foot-deep closet and a door connecting it to the middle bedroom, which is now the bathroom. So there was enough of the middle bedroom left over to get me a good closet, but I needed a bigger door opening than…
Read more
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…
Read more
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…
Read more
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…
Read more
I’m terrible at picking favorites. Ask me my favorite color or food and I’ll tell you I can’t pick just one. You’d think I’d have just as much trouble with houses. But you’d be wrong. This has been my favorite house for a solid 20 years. It’s in Atlantic City. More specifically, it’s in the…
Read more
I bit the bullet and hired the Irishman twice more. Here’s what I have to show for it. The oak counter next to the stove is in! I plan to sand off the old finish and oil it. (Also, the kitchen is getting tidier) The missing chip of wood on the banister has been patched.…
Read more
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…
Read more
And I didn’t even notice! Which is funny because I’ve been fixated on the end for a solid 3 years now. And it was 3 years of scope bloat. At first it was the things I needed to make the place safe, like this chimney. (This is behind my bookcases in April 2014) To the “while…
Read more