oldtownhome.com

We've been sharing most of our ongoing efforts and life over on Instagram, including detailed stories with how-tos, hacks, tricks, and favorite tools. After many years of wanting to do this, I finally put together a video tour of our 1886 row house. We didn't want to create another long and boring home tour video that you'd have no interest sitting through, so I decided to make it in the style of MTV Cribs. I hope to have a bit more time in the coming weeks and months to summarize many of our ongoing efforts.

Snowden’s new family wasn’t working out for him and we’d been moved to the top of the list if we wanted to meet him. Before meeting this pup at the rescue, before having our application accepted, Wendy told me “we have to agree on this, this isn’t a done deal just because we’re applying or meeting him, the decision isn’t mine, it’s ours, and we can walk away if it’s not right. He’d roll onto his back giving yo his belly, he’d check where she was before entering a room to make sure he wasn’t walking into a trap, and he’d only play with his own toys, no longer even attempting to play with Lulu. So like I said, let’s use the 8th anniversary of our blogging lives to welcome Truman as a new contributing member of Old Town Home.

The whole set's scale was large for our 15' wide row house, but it was a great price and has moved from room to room as we set up our dining room in a few different areas of the house. Sometime during the last six or so years, we looked at our vintage dining room set and said, "You know what, as great as this set has been, it's not quite right for our house. Much like a beloved car with 200k miles, that smells a little off and is always a quart low on oil, but has always successfully shuttled you from point A to B with little fanfare, our buffet could only be replaced with a piece of furniture that's juuuuuuust right! We like to think that our friend, in lieu of his family taking the cabinet, would be happy to know that it's sitting in our home just a few yards from the home he lived in and loved for so many years.

While removing the paint, we noticed it had adhered with an especially strong bond to any of the cement mortar that had been used, so we also wanted to undo some of the cement mortar repointing that had been done years ago before it began destroying the brick. But the area where the brick had been repointed with cement mortar, and it wasn't exposed to mortar (party wall with our neighbor), that damn paint was like a friggen rock! During the work, I introduced Sean's guys to an angle grinder repointer's dust shroud for the DeWalt angle grinders that facilitates dust collection and prevents the level of dust that's usually associated with messy repointing work. The end result of our effort to remove the old paint and cement mortar, and Sean's team to repoint everything, is pretty spectacular.