Chronicling my adventures restoring and updating a quirky old Philadelphia rowhouse
My plumber’s been in! That’s right, I have a working bathroom! Now it’s not all good news. Apparently I wasn’t supposed to tile all the way up to the valve, so my plumber got to have fun chipping out my work to make the trim piece fit. And he couldn’t make the one I wanted…
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So you saw last time that my floor patches were kind of terrifyingly unsupported because it looked better that way. After I wrote that my dad and I fixed the problem by putting subflooring up from the living room. Yep, fun job. Before that could happen, out came the old gas light lines.
Flooring progress has been slow and mostly more of the same. I decided to take out a few more damaged floorboards in the front bedroom; we’re better at it now. And reinforcing them from below, a two person job, hasn’t started yet. Instead, I did a floor reinstallation dry run in the back bedroom to…
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I feel like I’ve turned another corner with the house. I’ve constantly had to do bits and pieces of things all over the house to be ready for one contractor after another. I’ve started low priority things during downtime and not finished them. And I ended up spending half the summer siding the cantilever. Which…
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I wanted to be different than my parents. I said I wouldn’t give my life over to keeping a perfect house like theirs. I said buying a small rowhouse with no land would accomplish this. I said I was going to decorate differently than my mom. Maybe I will. But the most deep rooted, primal…
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Well first of all, some good news: my roofer came and finished my fascia! Yay! And now some bad news: I’m unimpressed with how it looks.
That’s right, I started off with talking about pretty things, but I’m gonna go through the back story before we talk about paint colors. Skip to the bottom if you want. Making the back pretty (for real) is my next step! The bay on the back of the house is also the part of the…
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Not Christmas, thank God. I’ll take the summer for now. Instead of garlands, we’re hanging clapboards. And they look good! Hardieplank, just like any wood siding, goes in from the bottom up. And to start it you need a shim so that the first board slopes out properly. After that each board laps over the…
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Well, today is Father’s Day. I know we all should show our appreciation to our fathers, but I think I’m forced to point out that mine’s better. I may have attempted to move the holiday up 2 weeks to suit my schedule (and do something he liked), but he didn’t have to work outside all…
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Remember the list of things I planned to do in May? It’s looking like I should have one of the three done in June. I’ve ordered Hardiplank siding for the cantilevered bay on the back. This is basically a mixture of sawdust, sand, and cement, similar to asbestos shingles but without the asbestos, that looks…
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