They parlayed their DIY aesthetic into a new career

But, Bright said, "it had been not touched just enough that I could see the potential."

The roof deck with views of Center City, the curving wall of the living room, and the original plaster ceiling medallions caught his eye.

A week before the sale closed, he was laid off. He bought the house anyway and got to work: ripping up carpet, exposing and repointing brick, doing his own plaster work where needed.

Along the way, he met Mangini - and the two discovered a shared passion for design; a whimsical, vintage-inspired aesthetic; and many dusty, grimy treasures just waiting to be reclaimed.

Mangini's contribution was an ability to make all those patinated finds look stylish.

"I'm good at the small picture; Percy's so much better at the big picture," she said. "He does a lot of the stuff I don't know how to do. I do a lot of sanding, painting, finding furniture, and styling - which is just finding cool stuff and arranging it in a way that looks cool to you. It seems really obvious to me, but Percy doesn't think it is."

Both are self-taught when it comes to renovations.

"So much of our design work is just about a gut feeling," Mangini said. The rest, she conceded, is trial and error.

Bright laid blue penny tile in the foyer. Then, deciding that didn't work, he ripped it out and painted the damaged wood flooring in a diamond pattern instead. In the kitchen, he wanted to paint an accent wall with graphic brown dots. After several other techniques failed to produce perfectly crisp circles, he resorted to cutting out stencils from freezer paper, one by one.

And when it came to their living room, the couple's lack of experience didn't limit their aspirations. "We'd seen a photo of this beautiful French parlor room, and we were like, 'Let's do that,' " Mangini said.

Go here to see the original:
They parlayed their DIY aesthetic into a new career