Chronicling my adventures restoring and updating a quirky old Philadelphia rowhouse
This wasn’t part of the plan, but the dishwasher decided to turn itself into a dish rack in the middle of this project. And giving it a bit of thought, we decided that while we’re at it all the appliances should be stainless steel. As proud as I was of buying the opposite of what…
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Well, yes. working on the kitchen the last time around was miserable and I wanted to do as little as possible and get on with my life. But still. We’ve been living with woodwork that was just primed and then partly sanded off and marked up with the Irishman’s notes and further damaged from years…
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At 960 square feet, the Crooked House is too small to have spaces that we don’t use regularly. Meanwhile, Tito and I both have demanding jobs and I have a soul-crushing commute and both of us would do well to have good space to work from home when we need it. That means a comfortable…
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I haven’t done anything to the front yet, but the plan is to restore it as close as possible to its original appearance. I’ll restore the original brick and marble, eliminate the plague of aluminum siding and awnings, restore or replicate the original wood trim, install wood windows (new or old). You can read more…
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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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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…
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This reminded my mom of that terrible old show where women would tell their tale of woe and the one with the saddest story would win stuff. Can you guess why? It’s not because my life is impressively sad. No, it has something to do with my washer and dryer. And the big priority was…
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