Of all the things we could have blogged about, I’m sharing something deeply personal with ya’ll: our toilets. When we first moved in, that obligatory cleaning happened, and we discovered we had a jewel with the vintage toilets. They have beautiful typography, which is very on trend today. Thick, bold, statement making letterforms, I just love it. We think these toilets are from 1937, the last time any major renovations were completed in the bathrooms. While the downstairs and some of the bedrooms have been renovated, we keep finding these untouched parts of the house. The bathrooms have lovely, textured original subway tile and honeycomb floor tile. While in some areas the tiles are cracked quite badly because of the house settling, I can’t even think about replacing it. I love that each tile has some type of different spider crack, I could stare at them all day.

We’ve been in the house a few months now, and gotten through some rough spots:

• If you live in the country and you don’t want your water to smell like rotten eggs, you have to get a fancy water filter system. Check.
• We had major beam and structural repairs completed under the house. The original beams from about 1850 (I think around that time) had some insect damage and need to be reenforced. We knew this when we bought the house because it was a large item to repair. All done, check.
• Let’s talk about that leak in the roof. Ok, let’s not. Replace partial roof, check.

• Serious mold remediation, check. Our basement was in pretty bad shape so we had to have it completely cleaned, special mold killing stuff applied, then heated to make it hot enough to kill the mold hiding in small cracks. Then an air cleaning and circulating machine was also installed to avoid the mold in the future. This is serious business. I’m so allergic, I couldn’t go in the basement for more than 5 minutes without getting a migraine. Getting the mold taken care of was super important because our basement is super cool. Not kinda cool, just beyond cool. There’s a wine cave section, a canning closet, not to mention the complete wood workshop. AWESOME. Back in the day our basement was where the kitchen was located, so the ceilings are full height, and there’s a half crumbled stove that looks like a bread oven in the corner. I love the windows down there too, since they are kinda half lit and dreamy. Everything has that soft, romantic feel even though it’s a basement. I’ll try and take some instagram shots over the weekend.

That’s the not-sexy reality of having an old house. Now I’m ready to start decorating this house. I’ve had some time to live in it, and think about design theory, do some historic research, and think about how we want to live in the house. Next up decorating!