Guest blogger here today! My husband usually does the blogging but I have stolen his computer and am going to give it a shot. Maybe you will hear from me now and again when I am not busy wielding a power tool or getting high on paint fumes. Since we bought the farm and have been living in this crazy hot mess as we have been renovating, there are many things that have bugged me to no end. For example the fact that after nearly a year and a half from packing up my household goods in Vegas, I still have a basement full of boxes and frequently cannot find the things I know I have somewhere. Early on I couldn’t find my iron, I just gave up and bought a new one. Good thing because it was a year before I found it and it was in the box with our paint sprayer…how did that get in there????

There are, conversely, many things that I have come to love about this house and have become some of my favorite things (insert musical notes and start humming like Julie Andrews here) This post is devoted to some of those things. Some are things we chose to do to the house during the reno and others are things intrinsic to the house. Either way, they are things that make my days happy even amidst the frequent discouragements that are inherent in a project this mammoth.

I bought this utility sink for my laundry room from Rejuvenation the week after we moved in the house and it sat in the box for a YEAR folks! I was so excited for this one on installation day and enjoy using it almost every day 🙂
When we first saw the house I was not crazy about the “octagon room” effect in the kitchen and a bedroom upstairs but soon after moving in I realized there was no fighting it and I was just going to have to “embrace the hex”…okay 8 sides or 6 I just wasn’t digging it but now have inserted subtle nods to the geometry of it all throughout the house. This tile “door mat” at the kitchen door consisted of 6 ugly beige 12×12 tiles that showed all the dirt. I swapped them out with these slate mosaic hex tile sheets and love the look and function.
Another hex in the kitchen comes in the form of these knobs my daughter helped me pick out from Anthropologie. I love opening my doors, such fun “jewelry” for my white cabinets!
More jewelry for the kitchen! I have always wanted a pot filler and am loving this one!
When my in-laws were renovating one of their bathrooms a few years back, they put an outlet in the back of the vanity drawer for hair dryer plug ins. I thought, why not for my hand mixer in the kitchen? The drawer closes nicely with the cord coming out and I love the fact that it is always there where I do my baking and is ready to go!
My Delta Trinsic Touch faucet. What’s not to love here? I didn’t even know this was a thing until the faucet salesman let me play with one in the showroom and I fell madly in love and told my husband I needed this in my life. Never want to live without this again, worth every penny, no messy hand gunk on the faucet.
So when we tore down a wall to open up the kitchen we were not on site, our contractor got a hold of us in Bulgaria and presented some options for structural alternatives. Site unseen we chose the option to have and extra pillar put in (the one on the right). When we got home and saw the opening we made lemonade out of lemons and used some wood from one of our barns and created the shelving that I get to put more of my favorite things on 🙂
These pocket French doors are a favorite that came with the house, they were however that nasty gold color that was all over the house and it was definitely not my favorite thing to paint them! They really block noise from the kitchen/family room area to the rest of the house so function here is tops! When my husband wants to stay up late and watch TV when I want to sleep or when I want to get up early and make a racket in the kitchen and he wants to snooze we just slide these beauties closed.
Okay, who says a toilet is a favorite thing? The lady who has to clean it! I love the American Standard model we chose for the sleek sides that are so much easier to clean than the standard snakey-shaped sides, (you all know what I am talking about) that I have always had.
I LOVE the front porch that runs the width of the house and we have spent the summer dining out of doors and enjoying every minute of it. Hopefully before it gets too cold we get the floor painted, I think we are going grey, any thoughts?
When my husband found out I wanted to do a “favorite things” post he felt sure I would want to include this lovely window insert air conditioning unit. Definitely one of my “unfavorite” things. Notice the green frog tape that has kept the bugs from getting through the cracks for the past year and the funky brown skewed mini blind that is actually mounted outside??? We now have central air but have not gotten around to ripping this out and replacing the glass. One of these days….
One last favorite thing before I go. I found this little brass bear at an Antique store in Easton just a few weeks after we had our bear visitor on our porch last summer. I knew he had to come home with me and he happily waves at me every day. The dealer told me he used to be an ink well and you would raise his head to dip your pen in. I just LOVE him!

I have so many other favorite things about this crazy fixer upper so some day when I am drained from demo or tired of tiling maybe I will show up here again, but in the meantime I will leave it to my blogging husband that does such a great job sharing our adventure!