Monday, March 24, 2008

Back in August, we bought an old house in West Philly. Our best guess is that the house was constructed sometime between 1910 and 1915. It's a great old house, but has been abused over its life. While I'm sure that the original occupants were quite caring for the building, it seems like there has been a whole line of owners that did things "just good enough" to suit their needs. Over the years, that's become the biggest issue for us to deal with.

The house is three stories, with a basement and an attic. Since there's only two of us in the house (not counting the two cats), we think we have plenty of room to move around as we work.

Our first "full" renovation is the second floor middle bedroom. While the demolition work has been in progress for a few months now, I took two solid days this weekend to complete the “gut job” of the room.

You can see some great shots of the work here: Home Improvement Photos on Flickr
 

"Remodeled" rooms aren't always what they seem.

I thought that some special attention was worth while for this photo. A recent remodel of the bathroom led to some interesting results. As you can see in the photo, the new ceiling of the bathroom is attached to a new framing structure that sits about a foot and a half below the original ceiling. I guess it would make sense if you needed a cavity for electrical, mechanical or plumbing access, but it looks like it was just done that way in an attempt to be lazy. They set the new framing up about 8 feet from the floor, which you would expect to make the drywall process easier. The problem is that they didn't bother leveling the new ceiling, so it's visibly uneven from the inside of the bathroom. Even better? The work they did to make the drywall installation easier was negated by the fact that it wasn't leveled... they had to cut drywall to fit into a gap between the top of the 8 foot boards and the ceiling board.

I know there's going to be a ton of interesting decisions to laugh at as we go through the house, but this one may survive to be in the top 10.

Labels: personal