Two married architects living the reno life on our historic garden block.
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Recent posts
In anticipation of Cinco de Mayo and my birthday, we freshened up our front stoop flowers and garden with the help of our garden cat: First things first, bring out the freshly purchased flowers and decide where to plant them: Such a beautiful day for hanging out in the garden: A new spring mix in the old chick&hens planter: Our boxwoods sadly did not make it thru the winter, so we replaced both of them. Crazy eyed Maddy helps out with the demo work: All the new flowers and boxwoods. The white pot holds a cut off we got in January and has been blooming in a vase of water ever since. In the garden, we weeded and set out our solar path lights and bunnies. I also pulled out some persistent ivy choking the liriope...
read more at Madison Square Posted 6 days 35 min ago.
So this is a project from back in January that has become a bit of a distraction (in addition to the usual life distractions) which has slowed our house progress and of course this post! We had one of these tvs for the last 10 years and before that I had actually inherited it from my grandmother… So you could say its a family heirloom! The kitten helps give you a sense of scale for our old box set. Luckily we never watch much TV, just the occasional movie, so we didn’t have to squint at it that often… But recently the picture has been staticky so it was time to finally upgrade: Since we didn’t want to go too crazy, we only upgraded to a 60″, which doesn’t look too bad on this wall. We did the usual wall mount...
read more at Madison Square Posted 2 weeks 3 days ago.
Okay, so this isn’t technically about our renovation project. But websites like these, listing all of the fabulous and unique aspects of our neighborhood, remind us WHY we love working so hard on our specific home in our specific neighborhood. Note our green “Graduate Hospital” hood is right in the middle of the map: One spring-like reason besides all of our lovely neighbors hanging outside and gorgeous flowers… our neighborhood has a Bikescore of 99!! Our garden tulips in bloom: Visit here for more info on our neighborhood: http://www.visitphilly.com/philadelphia-neighborhoods/graduate-hospital/ More importantly, visit here for more info on the G-HO bar crawl this weekend: http://www.uwishunu.com/2013/04/reminder-crawl-into-spring-at-graduate-h...
read more at Madison Square Posted 3 weeks 5 days ago.
The garden is starting to look more like it’s spring every day. No buds on the mulberry tree yet, but that’s ok- we can certainly wait for berry season… But check this out- don’t remember this from last year: These other little purple flowers are tucked in among the ivy, creeper and onion grass: The onion grass has been up for a while in this mild weather and is looking lush. Some lilies and tulips are starting to sprout too: See our neighbors daffodils and tulips blooming just up the block? Rob and Maddy cheered me on as I cleared out some wind blown debris and refilled the bird feeder. Great day for some fresh air and sun! Tagged: cat, garden, madison square...
read more at Madison Square Posted 6 weeks 2 days ago.
Our first project to reuse some of the cabinets we salvaged was to build a new fish tank stand. I built the current stand during my early college years. I took a circular saw to an entertainment center that was put out in the trash, deconstructed it, reconstructed it and painted it black. We definitely got our money’s worth out of this stand… I even expanded it from the cabinet section under the right side to include the legs for our current 55gal tank. For the new stand, two 24″ wide x 30″ tall x 12″ deep cabinets worked nicely. They perfectly fit the 55 gallon tank and provide plenty of storage. We then bought 2 packs of 6″ Ikea legs to go with our free cabinets...
read more at Madison Square Posted 9 weeks 26 min ago.
The architecture office we both work at is moving. I have worked on this awesome block of Walnut near Rittenhouse Sq for over a decade, and Kelly for half of that but alas the building was sold to become apartments… We will certainly miss the neighborhood, views, and especially our roof terrace on the 25 floor!...
read more at Madison Square Posted 9 weeks 3 days ago.
Yesterday morning the garden looked like this: One of the only snows that stuck this year… You can tell it was a mild winter because the onion grass is already up: So to get in the mood for spring, we checked out the Philadelphia Flower Show last night: Lots of fresh colors and ideas for spring: Something worked because this morning we woke up to weather in the 60′s – Maddy loves the open windows! Tagged: cat, flowers, garden, madison square...
read more at Madison Square Posted 10 weeks 3 days ago.
Our powder room, like many rooms, still needed a few finishing touches… art, antiques and plants. The art: currently this cool old artifact given to us by the previous owner of our office building. The art deco tower was sold recently (and is being converted to apartments), but it was originally built for Sun Oil in the late 1920′s with a multi-story valet parking garage tucked into the back of the building. This was one of the early signs from the garage. Simonizing was a waxing process named after a product invented in 1910 called simoniz. As in “Motorists Wise, Simoniz”...
read more at Madison Square Posted 16 weeks 3 days ago.
Time to build our sliding door for the basement. We ripped down plywood to be the nailing rails, squared them to each other, and clamped them to a table to keep the door square while we build it. For the face of the door, we used the scrap and left over tongue and groove boards from the new paneling we installed in our second floor bathroom. We had to piece it together in a few areas but had just enough. To make the build go faster we squared the boards at the top of the door and then cut off the bottom once all the boards were attached. The cat came out to help for a little bit as we finished up the door and installed the trolley brackets on top. And up it went! You can see all the paneling nicely matches up. Here is the shop inside view. So the door is now rolling!...
read more at Madison Square Posted 17 weeks 2 days ago.
After the holidays it is always hard to get back on track with house projects in the new year… So we are taking baby steps. Remember that wall we framed in the basement last year? We put strips of scrap plywood across the stud framing so that we can now installing wood paneling. We are using original tong & groove wood paneling that we salvaged when remodeling our 2nd floor bathroom...
read more at Madison Square Posted 17 weeks 3 days ago.