

Most of my Phone Photo Friday pictures are from my Instagram feed. Follow me @mahlbrandt if you’d like!


Most of my Phone Photo Friday pictures are from my Instagram feed. Follow me @mahlbrandt if you’d like!
We had our first official ReAbide sale just before Christmas:

Over the weekend Jason and I set out to find a replacement (and anything else we could find!) We were thrilled to find this Bassett long dresser. It was in pretty rough shape but Jason is truly a restoration artist! He got started on it right away, sanding, staining, polyurethaning. It was not 100% done before he had to go out of town for work so it’s not officially in the shop yet.

I also updated a few pictures and added some new items to the ReAbide website and Facebook page.


We’re excited to get rolling in 2013, doing more furniture pickin’, restoration, selling and staging. Happy New Year!
The week before last, we had a load of 5 tons of gravel delivered to our courtyard. Jason graciously spent most of a Friday spreading about 3.5 tons. (The rest will be used somewhere else.) I was so tired so walking through the mud to get to the lovely paver stone path Jason made up to our front door steps…and mainly tired of Lucy getting her paws muddy. We’re taking our landscaping one step at a time but there are a few big things we wanted to tackle ASAP. The courtyard is a high priority to me because it’s the front entrance, the first impression of our house, and we’re expecting a lot of guests in the first weeks and months in our new house. When I looked at the pictures I took of the courtyard, I realized it came out really, really close to my Photoshop rendering!
Before:

Rendering:

After:

I love how the windows reflect the sky.
We’re going to add a short fence and gate between the corner of the garage and the concrete wall to enclose all 4 sides and make it a true courtyard. Here’s the mock up I sent to our contractor, based on the fence we designed and built for our last house.We ultimately decided to keep this element out of the construction budget. Jason and I will build this, hopefully in January. The opening is only 12′ across so it’ll be so easy compared to a whole fence. And maybe will inspire us to add some privacy fencing around the backyard later in 2013.



We tried out our chalkboard wall in the den/playroom on Christmas Eve. It went really well for about 5 minutes before Ali decided to try eating the chalk.
Most of my Phone Photo Friday pictures are from my Instagram feed. Follow me @mahlbrandt if you’d like!
I love the Instagram community. It’s got to be my favorite iPhone app. A couple of my MCM followers requested an IG house tour so I’m obliging little by little, as rooms are decent enough to share. Since it might be awhile before I’m ready for any kind of more substantial (finished/decorated) house tour with real camera photos, I figured I’d share them here, too.
Kitchen

Dining Room

Master Bathroom

Living Room



What I’m now calling my work room (tri-purpose: office, craft, laundry)

This room is also tri-purpose: Den/Playroom/Guestroom … sort of. It pretty much just looks like a playroom for now. One day it might become a bedroom. I’m trying to confuse you… is it working? Let’s just call this the den:


Hall bathroom

Master bedroom (we’re shopping for furniture)

Jason’s studio

The future kids room has become kind of a catch-all. It’s the only room we have left to unpack and clean up. Besides hanging art everywhere else and coming up with some storage solutions in my office and the garage, we’re settled!

Are you all sick of seeing photos of our house yet?


I let my jewelry obsessed daughter wear one of my necklaces the other day. I think Ali’s expression says it all!
Most of my Phone Photo Friday pictures are from my Instagram feed. Follow me @mahlbrandt if you’d like!
There has been a theme resonating through our lives for the past year or two… restoration. Actually, it’s been longer than that. When we bought our 1954 ranch nearly 6 years ago, we started collecting vintage furniture and accessories to match the era of our home. Jason and I enjoy a good vintage store or antique mall but more for looking than buying. We prefer the treasure hunts through yard sales, thrift stores and estate sales. We like sifting through junk and finding diamonds in the rough. They often don’t look like diamonds until they’ve had a little TLC. That’s where the restoration theme first started ringing. It was almost two years ago that Jason and I started talking about becoming foster parents. When God gave me a vision of “the room” — a mix of new and old pieces carefully selected, each with a story, coming together to make a beautiful space — I started to connect the dots. Foster care is all about restoration, too: restoring love, restoring trust, restoring health, restoring family, restoring hope. Out of the steady hum of restoration ReAbide was born.

In short it’s a new business, Jason and I are starting. I have a full vision for 3 parts of ReAbide but for this season in our lives, only part 1 is unfurling: New Life for Quality Vintage Furnishings. Giving old furnishings a second (third, fourth…) chance at a new home. If you’ve been reading this blog more than a month, you know that Jason and I have quite a collection of vintage, mid-century modern furniture and accessories. Jason is a lamp fanatic… I think I’ve seen at least 12 since we’ve started unpacking. Since we have more than we need for ourselves and also because friends have started commissioning us for find things for them, we decided to start reselling some of our furnishing through private sales.

The second facet of ReAbide Furnishings is home staging. We love putting rooms together and we love real estate — home staging with mid-century modern and modern furniture was a natural progression of things. Many of the pieces we’ll use for home staging will also be available for purchase. We’re just starting out in this facet. We have a good friend who is a real estate guru and we were able to add a few of our items into the mix at a house he recently renovated. We were hoping to have whole finished rooms to reveal but he had already hired another home stager who scrambled our pieces in with hers. I did take a few progress shots while we were bringing in our collection, before it was all rearranged by the other stager and before we had brought in a dining table or rugs. Quick snaps with my phone but I’m glad I got them; better than nothing.

I’d be honored if you would check out ReAbide.com and like the brand new ReAbide on Facebook!
Among the many toys unpacked from storage was a box of play-doh. When Ali pulled it off the shelf in the playroom, I decided it was time to introduce her to the squishy, doughy goodness. She’s not putting things in her mouth quite so much anymore so I figured she’d get to enjoy it for at least a minute or two before I had to take it away.




I was right.

“Ali, if you taste it again, Mommy is going to have to take it away.”

Oh, this age of budding independence is interesting… Every time I give her an ultimatum, she tests it. If nothing else, she is learning that Mommy means what she says.


Most of my Phone Photo Friday pictures are from my Instagram feed. Follow me @mahlbrandt if you’d like!
It’s time to tell you about my favorite Christmas present from last year, in case you still need an idea for that hard-to-shop-for someone on your list. It’s not the gift that got the most use (that would be our Keurig) but it’s the one that has saved us hundreds of greasy paper towels and time cleaning a grease splattered stove, oven or microwave…which is pretty awesome. Gifted to me by my beloved.
Meet Piggy Wiggy the bacon tray.

Microwave bacon trays are not hard to come by but I was searching high and low for one that had a lid. Without a lid the grease still splatters all over the microwave (or requires lots of paper towels), so what is the point? Then I found Joie Piggy Wiggy. Not only does it have a lid, it has a pink vented lid with a pig-face handle. It’s perfect. The grid on the tray allows the grease to drain off the bacon and everything is contained. No more throwing away 5 greasy paper towels just to cook a few strips of bacon. The grease can easy be dumped into a jar and the two parts scrub clean pretty easily. Did I mention it’s less than $10 with free shipping on Amazon? What are you waiting for … git one!