A WORK IN PROGRESS

Caitlin Chase has loved redecorating since childhood. Now with a home of her family’s own, she’s tackling projects big and small.

• By Paul Jablow
• Published Feb 22, 2023

For Caitlin Chase, the redecorating bug hit early.

She convinced her parents to let her redecorate her room while growing up in Chicago.

“I was always moving things around,” she recalled. “They let me paint one wall. I must have painted it five times.”

But the work didn’t go much further for decades.

She moved to Philadelphia seven years ago for work, after spending several years in Austin, Texas. Chase took on small projects in an apartment at 11th and Pine Streets. And after she got married, the rowhouse that she and husband Chris lived in didn’t need a lot of work.

But with a daughter on the way and the need for a permanent home, Chase had her chance.

The four-bedroom, four-bath house in Wallingford, built in 1963, was structurally sound and the exterior fit well in the neighborhood. But the interior was far from what she could see in her design crystal ball.

“This was my first opportunity to re-envision a whole space,” Chase said. “I gravitated toward mid-century modern because I wanted to honor some of the architectural sense of the house.”

The work started two weeks before daughter Maya’s arrival, and Chase has quasi-fond memories of being nine months pregnant, squatting on all fours on the main stairwell, cleaning and repainting the grungy risers.

“We painted the entire house ourselves right before we moved in, and I’m planning to continue choosing paint colors and other design elements as I work on the design of each room,” she said.

• The ceiling in the sunken living room had been painted dark purple (that was later changed to white), and most of the home’s lighting was either non-functioning or fluorescent.

• “We added new, softer light throughout and a few more modern fixtures,” Chase said. “There was an old glass chandelier in the dining room that we replaced with a rattan-style light to make the room more warm and inviting.”

• The living room fireplace was a major challenge, a mass of soot framed in stone so dark that she couldn’t clean it, but had to whitewash it, instead.

She and Chris “have learned a lot about how to make the house our own on a tight budget,” she said.

Architecturally, the largest parts of the project involved the kitchen and the front hall. The old galley kitchen was opened up with the removal of a wall, and floor-to-ceiling windows leading from the kitchen to the backyard were scrapped because they served no useful purpose.

“When we tore up the kitchen floor to replace it with red oak wood, we found four layers of old flooring, including tile and laminate dating back to the original construction of the home,” Chase said. “We widened the entrance to the kitchen to make it more open, and added the arch detail to match the original arch down the hall in the front door entryway.”

In the kitchen, she added a storage closet, with plantation shutters she found by the side of the road as doors and a wallpapered interior. The kitchen contractors “kind of made fun of me,” Chase said, since that effort wouldn’t generally be seen.

Her reply: “The details matter.”

She also scrapped a dark screen partition at the top of the main stairwell, giving that area a more open feel.

The front hall was another major project, where she pulled up the tile and replaced it with red oak flooring, wallpapered, and installed French doors that she got on Facebook Marketplace, once again opening up the space.

Still, there is a hefty to-do list.

Caitlin works for a New Jersey-based communications agency, mostly out of the home. Her office is in one of the bedrooms, and she plans to have a wall built to divide the room.

The primary bathroom will be redone, adding a walk-in shower, and there will be as-yet-unspecified upgrades to the primary bedroom.

The basement will be another major project, with a planned bedroom and kitchenette, possibly for use as an Airbnb.

“Ultimately, all of this work is really for Maya,” she said, “as it’s an investment in a place we can make our own and grow in together as a family.”

Anticipated completion date for all this? She laughed.

“As soon as we save up enough money.”

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