Here in good ol' Bawlmer we refer to our rowhouses as one word, as opposed to "row houses". This makes sense to me. Since my house adjoins others maybe the words should also be conjoined too. I've noticed some links on some of houseblogs to this site have it as two words. After Wikipedia'ing 'Rowhouse' it sent me to an explanation for Terraced house. I don't have a terrace, so not sure how I fit in this category, but reading down the page shows that row houses are indeed two words. That said, that's not how we roll in gramatically incorrect Baltimore so we will stick with the one word. Y'all fancy folks on the intarweb can use two words if you like.
And now, onto the real post. I've never posted a picture of the outside of the house. Now that the front door has been replaced and the window trim is being painted I thought I'd put some pics. Keeping true to form I will forego the before pictures and just show pics mid progress.
The new door is wood and we decided to paint it black. I'd like to paint the trim black too, but the last trim painter was a bit sloppy and got a lot of white paint on the brick. Also, the new front window is vinyl so not sure how that would look. Do y'all think it would look better with black or white trim?
The door isn't anything too fancy as we wanted it to fit the style of the neighborhood, and I didn't feel like spending a ton of money on this project. Also, I wanted to keep all of the trimwork around the door and front window original so that meant no steel or fiberglass doors. Either of these options wouldn't have been able to be planed to fit in existing framing and I was NOT going to rip out all the trim to have some ugly pre-hung completely square door put in place.
As you can see, prehung doors and windows have been forced into many houses in the area. Many rowhomes have stained glass transoms above the door with the house numbers in the glass. While I love this bit of character I have only a single pane piece of glass with house number stickers on it. Last night I put new modern satin nickel house numbers up and can soon scrape the ugly stickers off.
Also notice that the whole block is rowhomes with all with the original marble steps. There is a large marble quarry north of Baltimore, so most of the steps came from there. In fact, most of the marlbe on the Washington Monument is from just north of Baltimore. I wish there were some painted screens, but sadly there are none on my block.
I'll be on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi for the next couple of days, so no work on the house. I'm looking forward to seeing how far things have come along since Katrina, and eating at some of my favorite places like The Shed (as seen on Food Network), and maybe even Trapani's over in Bay St. Louis. I'm craving Trapani's trout smothered in crab, shrimp and hollandaise. Yum.
