Smart Home upgrades can be intimidating, at least they were to me. There is just so much tech and it changes so quickly! I nervously dove into the smart home space with the Merc, knowing nothing and learned a ton. So here I am, passing my knowledge on to you.

It seems like there is a smart home product for almost everything right!? Except folding your laundry. FOR THE LOVE, can someone PLEASE figure that out?!! Like I mentioned before, I have had very little smart home experience and the thing is, it can be as easy or as complicated as you want. I started off by asking our electrician during our electrical walk through about it and he told me about these huge expensive integrations that had to be hard wired into the walls, had a master control panel, and seemed like a HUGE commitment for something that could be outdated very quickly. So then I did what I always do when I’m wrestling with a decision. I went to Home Depot. Most of the smart home products that they have there are aftermarket, meaning you can install them in a house that is already built.

Is it worth hiring out drywall work? In a word? Yes. Let’s Recap.

This post was sponsored by Travelers Insurance; all opinions are my own.

Hey guys! Whether you’re working on a renovation like the Merc, building a new house, or having some plumbing updated, your contractor is probably THE singular most important decision that you can make. Going into the renovation I wouldnt have thought that, but after almost a year of working with our amazing one, and seeing first hand what happens when you have a crappy one, I stand by that statement.

We all know that there is loads and loads of planning that goes into a renovation/new build right? There are always budgets and big expenses involved. It’s SO easy to go over budget on renovations because what looks like a few hundred here, and a thousand or two there turns into tens of thousands seemingly overnight. it’s really easy to find your dream tile and think “I’ll just take money from something else and put it here”. But where can that extra money actually come from?

That approach, I’ll save on the things that don’t matter, so I can spend on the things that do, seems really logical. But my eyes were opened to what that actually looks like, so lets talk about it!

Let’s talk front door paint. Repainting your front door is one of the quickest ways to bring some serious curb appeal to your house, but you have to do it the right way and you have to use the right kind of exterior paint, or else it looks like garbage after just a few months.

When you come to the Merc for a tour, we show you all of our favorite things. The custom wood floors, all of the potential in phase 2, our cool cabinet hardware, and this weekend we added another thing to that list. Our new Moen GX garbage disposal (video proof of Court’s obsession at the end of this post ?). I’d never given garbage disposals much thought except in that stressful moment in the middle of the night when you can’t remember which switch on the wall is the disposal and which one is the light over the sink. But after our latest project installing a Moen GX I feel fully qualified to have an intelligent conversation all about garbage disposals.

There have been multiple times during the Merc renovation that I said aloud “MY GOSH. How do normal people do this?!” By normal I mean, not the type of people that think/talk/dream about design all day everyday….ya know, people with hobbies. ? There are just so many decisions to make! And they domino, so you can’t screw it up or the whole thing turns out horrible.

Hi. No pressure.

Picking out tile for the Merc has hands down been the hardest thing. Here’s the problem, I love everything. Also I love color. Also pattern ??. Which lead me down a rabbit hole of colorful patterns that were super fun and very thrilling. (Did you know that homedepot.com has got some CRAZY cool tile? You can see some of my favorite patterns here!) But I kept coming back to the authentic style of the Merc. It was built in 1928 and the goal was to keep it in that era, and guess what? Crazy patterned tile wasn’t part of the world in Santa Clara UT in 1928. So I’d scrap those ideas and bring myself back to black and white. But then my mind would start to wander again and I’d get caught up in the crazy fun tiles all over again.

What finally broke this vicious cycle was deciding first and foremost what THE MOST important tile related design was. Was it the backsplash in the kitchen? The bathroom floors? The hallways? If you’re in this cycle that seems to never end, use this trick because it totally worked. Ultimately I realized that it was the Merc logo on the floor in the entryway. It was the single most important tile situation in the whole building, something I was unwilling to compromise on. That was an easy decision, and like it does, everything domino’ed from there.