Welcome to House 173
A 99-year-old house. Nearly thirty years of projects. And apparently, we're still not finished.
House 173 was built in 1927. We've been here for nearly three decades, which is long enough to learn that an old house is never really finished. You repair something. You uncover something else. You plant a tree and wait twenty-five years for the shade. You take apart a window because it needs a little attention and eventually find yourself studying layers of paint like an archaeologist.
Somewhere along the way, I started writing it all down.
House173.com is about an old house, certainly, but it isn't really a restoration blog. It's about living with an old house—the projects, discoveries, mistakes, gardens, tools, memories, dogs, family stories and ordinary things that accumulate when you stay in one place long enough.
If you're new here, you don't need to start at the beginning.
Start with these eight stories.
Welcome to 173!
Every old house has a history. This one also has a habit of leaving clues.
When we came to House 173 nearly thirty years ago, we weren't buying a museum piece or embarking on some grand restoration plan. We were buying a home. Since then, rooms have changed, gardens have grown, colors have come and gone, and one project has had an uncanny ability to lead directly to another.
The photograph above is an earlier House 173. Look closely and you'll recognize the house from the top of this page, but not quite the House 173 you see today.
That's really where this story begins.
99 Things I've Learned From a 99-Year-Old House
Live with an old house long enough and eventually it starts teaching you things.
Some lessons are practical. Old wood is usually worth saving. Nothing is ever quite square. And the project you think will take an afternoon has an excellent chance of occupying the rest of the weekend.
Other lessons take longer. Houses change slowly. Gardens change even more slowly. The things you once wanted to replace may become the things you're most grateful somebody before you left alone.
After nearly thirty years at House 173, I tried to write down ninety-nine of those lessons—one for every year the house has been standing.
Why Does House 173 Have an Enclosed Front Porch?
House 173 has thirteen windows across its enclosed front porch.
Thirteen.
That's a lot of glass for a room that isn't quite indoors and isn't quite outdoors. And once you start wondering why somebody built a porch that way in the 1920s, a simple question about your own house can lead surprisingly far afield.
That's the idea behind Why Is My House Like This?
Start with something peculiar about House 173. Look for clues in the house itself. Wander into old advertisements, building practices, architectural history and whatever other rabbit holes turn up along the way. Then, eventually, try to find your way back home.
Usually we do.
This time, the clues were all those windows.
Window Restoration: The Study, Part 1
Old windows have a way of turning a small repair into an archaeological dig.
This one came out of the Study at House 173. What began as an attempt to repair an original double-hung window eventually meant taking the sash apart, removing the glass, scraping and sanding the wood, and figuring out how nearly a century of paint, putty and previous repairs had all gone together.
Somewhere underneath all of that was another little piece of the house's history: the original green paint.
This is the sort of project that happens often around here. You start out trying to fix something. Before long, you're labeling old pieces, saving original glass and trying very hard not to destroy the thing you're supposedly repairing.
Sometimes restoration is less about making an old house new again than figuring out how to let the old parts keep doing their jobs.
Back Porch Rehab ’24: The Megapost
There is a dangerous sentence in old-house ownership:
“While we're at it…”
A small repair becomes a larger repair. Something comes off that wasn't supposed to come off. You discover what has been hiding behind something else. Materials begin accumulating in the yard. Tools migrate out of the workshop.
And eventually you stand back, look at what you've done and realize there is absolutely no going back now.
The 2024 back porch rehab was that kind of project.
It wasn't particularly glamorous, and for quite a while it wasn't particularly pretty. But this is what much of the work at House 173 actually looks like: figure out what needs doing, take it apart, repair what you find, change the plan when necessary and eventually put the house back together.
Preferably before winter.
The Yard Stone: A Small Story That Became Part of Home
It is, after all, just a rock.
Except it isn't anymore.
The Yard Stone has been sitting at House 173 for years, collecting smaller stones, leaves, dirt and the occasional inspection by a beagle. Nobody planned for it to become important. There was no project involved, no restoration and certainly no grand design.
It simply stayed.
And that's one of the things that happens when you live somewhere for a long time. Ordinary objects acquire stories. Trees become landmarks. A particular chair becomes your chair. A rock in the yard stops being just a rock and becomes part of the geography of home.
House 173 is full of things like that.
You probably are, too.
Before There Was a Blog
House173.com began in 2010. The projects did not.
By the time I wrote the first post here, we'd already been living at House 173 for thirteen years. Walls had come down. Rooms had changed. Tools had been bought, broken and replaced. There were plenty of projects that happened before anybody thought to call any of this a blog.
The third floor was one of them.
This photograph is from 1998, barely a year after we bought the house. Up there beneath the sloping roof were exposed framing, an old brick chimney, extension cords, construction debris and a dog who apparently considered the whole operation perfectly normal.
Looking at those old photographs now, I realize they recorded more than a renovation. They caught House 173 near the beginning of our time here, when nearly everything about the place was still new to us and we had no idea how many projects would follow.
The blog came later. The story was already underway.
And Sometimes You Stop
There is always something to do at House 173.
A window needs attention. Something needs painting. Something else needs fixing. The garden has its own list, and the workshop is full of projects waiting their turn.
But every once in a while, you stop.
You sit down, or, in this case, find yourself on the porch floor, and look up through the windows at blue sky, white clouds and the leaves of trees that weren't even there when you first came here.
Nothing is being repaired. Nothing is being improved.
You're just there.
After nearly thirty years, I've come to think those moments belong to the story of House 173 just as much as any renovation does.
Maybe more.
There Is a Lot More Upstairs.
Eight stories aren't nearly enough to explain House 173.
There are old-house mysteries we haven't solved, photographs that lead back to things I'd nearly forgotten, and an entire tenth of an acre outside where trees, gardens, dogs and nearly thirty years of ordinary life have accumulated stories of their own.
So if you'd like to keep wandering, here are a few good places to go next.
Why Is My House Like This?
Old houses are full of things that make you stop and ask why. This series starts with one of those questions at House 173, follows the clues through old building practices and history, and eventually finds its way back home.
One Photograph, One Story
Sometimes an ordinary photograph turns out to contain far more than I remembered. One picture becomes a way back into an old project, a forgotten detail, a dog, a garden, or simply what House 173 looked like at one particular moment in its life.
One-Tenth of an Acre
House 173 sits on roughly one-tenth of an acre in the city—not much land by most standards. But after nearly three decades, even this little patch of ground has accumulated a history of trees, plants, birds, benches, dogs and overlooked corners of its own.
The Stacks
Or forget the guided tour entirely. The Stacks is the complete House 173 archive—all the projects, discoveries, photographs, mistakes, memories and assorted rabbit holes gathered in one place.
