While I'm gone, I'm leaving Rambling Renovators in the hands of some wonderful guest bloggers. They'll be posting about their favourite Old & New things - the old things which infuse their homes with history, meaning, or a sense of family, and the new things which make their home feel fresh and modern.

I think rooms come to life when you mix the old and the new. Rooms look eclectic, lived in, gathered over time instead of pulled off a showroom floor. In my home, we've tried to create a modern + vintage traditional look so you'll find lots of old worn things on our shiny new counters.

My favourite old thing in our home is this marching band photo...

Is it strange to love a photo of 200 strangers? I look at this photo and wonder what their stories were... who were these men? What were their lives like in 1912 when this photo was taken? Their non-smiling expressions and the uniformity of their, well, uniforms, draws me in. I'd been looking for one of these for a long time and finally found this at the Christie Antique Show. It was a good length and still in the original frame. I knew I wanted to place the frame over our bed - and we basically planned the layout of the panelled wall around the photo!


My favourite new thing in our house? It has to be the fireplace. One of the reasons we bought our house was because it had a fireplace - but the original wood-burning fireplace was large, crumbling, and very ugly. So we took it out a week after we moved in... we just didn't think it would take four years to replace it!

The new fireplace is modern but classic and timeless. I love the cool feel of the hard marble and how it looks against the blazing hot stones when the fire is on. But the thing I love most about it is that we made it; we designed it, we built the frame, we choose the stone (after many many many hours of discussion and compromise), and HandyMan lay every tile. Its a part of "us" that now stands permanently in our home. I guess new things can carry meaning too!
So what's your favourite old and new things in your home? Come back over the next two weeks to see what it is in the homes of some great bloggers. See you when I get back!