One of the things that made Philadelphia attractive to Farrell and me as a place to live was the affordability of housing. Despite the fact that Philly is a very livable city, being nicely situated along the northeast corridor with a great music scene, decent art, and lots of interesting people, we realized during a visit here in 2002 that it was still possible for people such as ourselves to purchase a large house with lots of potential, right in the center of town. So we moved here, largely for that reason alone.

Probably the most sickening thing about graduating from medical school was realizing how crippled we were by our student loans. Until the year that we graduated, student loans were not counted against a borrower when they entered the process of mortgage application. The idea used to be that since these loans are deferred during one’s residency anyway (sometimes for up to 5 years) that they really had no bearing on one’s financial reality, and therefore did not matter. I was told that what happened is that enough people decided that they hated medicine (or law, or whatever academic endeavor resulted in the accumulation of their debt burden) that they dropped out of practice, took a job as a barista, and defaulted on their loans. So the powers that be (thank you, Fannie Mae) decided that they would count these subsidized loans when calculating an individual’s “debt to income ratio,” thereby screwing thousands of people such as ourselves. But this post is not about that. Don’t get me started. Ultimately we got a loan, after much effort and faxing of papers, and started searching for our new home.

We finally found one after almost a year of visiting and turning down dozens of houses, and, I was certain, convincing our realtor that we had no real intention of ever actually buying anything. I was pregnant for most of that time, and as my belly grew, my nesting instinct began to override any aesthetic that I had previously maintained. Farrell became the voice of reason that kept me from putting an offer on every house I walked into by the end of our search. But when we first entered this house, we immediately agreed that it was the one for us. Two buildings, each one 2000 square feet, built in the late 1800s with high ceilings, lovely turn-of-the-century mouldings and, best of all, a 25-foot bar built into the first floor, which had served for the past 50 years as a social club for wayward veteran boxers. The walls of the first floor were entirely covered with old black and white photographs of hopeful young fighters, fists cocked.

We were inspired. We would gut the first floor and build our kitchen and living space and after restoring the upper floors we would have an awesome new dwelling. We put in an offer. Right before we had actually signed a contract, in July of 2004, we got a phone call from our realtor. She told us that there had been an electrical fire in the building and that it was pretty much trashed. We drove over there in a panic and found the owners sadly milling about inside the charred wreckage. The house was still filled with smoke. We were devastated.

Because we are insane, we decided to buy the house anyway. We got the house for a drastically reduced price and used the extra money to repair most of the damage done. It still smelled like a campfire when we moved in last winter, but we set up shop in the part of the building most distal from the fire damage and convinced ourselves that all was well.

Now, a year later, we are preparing ourselves for the next phase of renovation. We still haven’t started to occupy the first floor, which still has the bar, an old piano, a linoleum floor, and men’s and women’s bathrooms, which were mostly destroyed by the firemen, who apparently are trained to smash things like toilets and sinks while putting out a fire.

Anyway, I thought it would be fun to do a photo essay as we continue to renovate. So today, I will start with some photographs that we took the day that we signed our contract in September 2004. Hopefully, every few weeks (months?!?), my entry will be about the incredible leaps of progress that we have made, eventually culminating in an invitation to our housewarming, sometime in 2010. Haha, I hope I am kidding.

Don’t feel too sorry for us, though. This is what our room looks like now: