What am I doing here?

Over the past 10 or so months, I have been clearing out my 94 year old grandfather's house.

December 1970. My mom (Cathy) poses with her baby niece (Michelle) while my grandmother (Charlen/ Meme) and her mother (Grandmother Miles) look on

My grandmother always had excellent taste, as did her mother, and so on. I tell you this, not so I can brag about being a 23 year old who is regularly dealing with hand cut crystal, but to emphasize that this house was filled with generations worth of treasures.

Treasures that I have dug through and sorted and unpacked and cleaned and learned the family history of and found a new place for. I found myself researching the cultural history of several of these treasures, learning all sorts of new information on subjects from porcelain production to silversmiths to Turkish rugs to knife boxes.

And what does anyone do with a new wealth of information? Start a blog!

I'll take you on a trip through my family treasures and tell you about the item itself and any family anecdotes I may have to go with it. Additionally, I'll go over how to incorporate old pieces into your household without feeling like you're living in a time capsule* and how to give treasures that have lost their purpose a new life.

I treasure retro, vintage, and antique pieces but I do not shrug off the importance of new treasures*. Everything that is old was once new and just happened to be lucky enough to stick around. When you look at your home and what you fill it with, think about how excited you would be to find the equivalent items that your great grandmother used. Your grandmother's grandmother's handkerchiefs. Your great great aunt's mixing bowl. Whatever your grandmother got in trouble for treating like a toy when she was little. These are the pieces that were just everyday things to their original owners, but have become treasures for the next generation.

This blog is for us, for the next generation. We are the ones who find the faded stories in the treasures of the generations before us. The ones who hope to leave enough of a story that the generation after us continues to add the next chapter. At the moment, however, we are the next generation and must figure out what is going to continue on and how. So I hope you'll join me on this journey.

*not that there's anything wrong with living in a time capsule if that is your jam

*I am a Maxxinista

*As a spoiler I'll tell you we have what could possibly be called "more dishes than we could need" meaning place settings will be heavily featured on this blog.