Dream Bookshelves

I was sick the last few days. I hate being sick because it is such a waste of time. It is great to have a few days off from work but I like to use my time off for either a vacation or to do stuff around the house. Unfortunately, I was so sick that I did absolutely nothing (other than complain a lot) . However, I did find some time to daydream about a few things that I would eventually like to have in our home. I love the room below because it has two things that I love: a wall of bookshelves and a wall of gallery pictures. I am a big fan of framing everything…especially old pictures. I love this room.

Master Bedroom (with some furniture)

These are some pictures of the master bedroom while we were setting up the bedroom furniture. The picture below shows the bed frame. I ended up buying the bed frame, matching chifforobe, matching dressing table and matching end tables by accident! I went to Freeman’s auction house on Chestnut Street, in Philadelphia and found what I thought were two end tables and a dressing table. I placed an absentee bid for a maximum amount of $175. I was totally excited when I got a call from Freeman’s telling me that I had won the items. I went to pay and pick up the items when I found out that I had won a King size bed frame and a Chifforobe in addition to the end tables and dressing table. Clearly we couldn’t fit all this in our tiny car so we had to find someone with a truck! We managed to get all the stuff in to our tiny apartment in center city (all the furniture had to be carried up a winding staircase). There was no place to set up the bed so we basically stored the headboard, footboard and all the many other parts under tables, behind couches and underneath our bed.


The picture below shows a closeup of the wood. What can I say other than that I totally scored. I have no idea who the maker of this fabulous furniture is other than the labels on all the pieces say that they were made in West Germany. I would guess that they are from the 1950s.


You can see a little bit of the chifforobe in the picture below. I don’t generally like all my furniture (or plates, or mugs) to match but I love this furniture all together. I am so glad that all these pieces fit in our room.


I will post some pictures of the dressing table this week. The picture of the bed room is a little outdated but the furniture arrangement is the same. The furniture weighs too much to move around.

Master Bedroom

This is what the Master Bedroom looks like after we painted the walls and hung up the chandelier. I bought the vintage Spanish chandelier on ebay for $75 (and it had all the original crystals). I love the windows throughout the house. They are big and let lots of light into the house. All the moldings in the house are original pine or new pine that we installed. Some of the old wood had rotted so they had to be replaced. The old doors and old molding that we kept had to be stripped of the old paint before they could be re-painted. We hired someone to strip the old paint because it was far too tedious of a process. We also replaced all the hollow faux wood doors in the house with solid wood doors. I don’t understand why all the doors these days are hollow plastic and why all the moldings are plastic. They look really bad and it doesn’t cost that much more to get real wood.


This picture below shows the original pine floors that were sanded and re-finished. This floor was covered in greenish carpeting and beneath the carpeting there were two layers of linoleum tiles. The first layer of linoleum was made to look like wood…I am totally baffled that someone would want to cover up these amazing floors with something that looked remotely like wood!


This is what the room looked like when we bought the house:


There were three layers of wallpaper and crumbling plaster behind the wallpaper. It took us an eternity to remove the wallpaper and re-plaster the walls. The side of the wall that can not be seen in this picture is beautifully curved.

I will post some pictures this week showing what the bedroom looks like now.

Kiran’s Room


This is what the back room looked like when we bought the house. We were originally planning on using this room as a tv room/office. The floors were covered in beige bleach stained carpet. However, compared to the rest of the house this room needed very little work. Unfortunately the wood in this room was completely damaged so we had to install new floors. We had someone install wood planks and stained them a natural color to blend with the floors in the rest of the house.


The back room was used as a storage room during the renovations in the rest of the house.

The back room after the new wood floors were installed.

This is what the back room looks like now. It is now Kiran’s bedroom.


The windows in this room face south and west and the room is always filled with light. I love hanging out in this room.

Lanterns and garlands over Kiran’s bed.

Kiran playing in his room.


Welcome to my Blog chronicling the renovation of our row house in Philadelphia. In 2007, we bought a 1600 square foot row home in an exciting area of Philadelphia. The house was built in 1880. When we first saw the house the walls were swathed in layers upon layers of wallpaper; and the pine wood floors were covered in thick black glue, linoleum and red carpets! The plaster walls were crumbling but other than that the house was structurally sound. We fell in love with the layout of the house, the wonderful curved plaster walls on the second floor and the fact that nothing in the house was straight. The house was built at an angle on an angled lot and was just so unique and perfect for us.

We closed on the house at the end of April 2007. We then spent the next several months stripping the wall paper, salvaging the plaster walls that we could, erecting new walls and painting. It was a lot of work but finally the house was in move-in condition. We moved into the house at the end of August 2007. Since then we have been working on the house as much as we can. In April 2008 we had our beautiful baby boy Kiran. Since then we have pretty much slowed down on the renovations. However, we have started again with gusto.

In this blog I will document our progress in restoring our quirky house into what she (yes it is a she) was meant to be.