Tour through blogland!

Hi, friends! Today I’m participating in a tour that lots of fun bloggers are taking part in right now. I was invited by Katie from Little House of Four.

This lovely girl is a DIY queen – you have to check out her gorgeous DIY Herringbone box and of course these clever industrial Pipe Shelves! Katie has amazing vision for taking humble or discarded objects and completely transforming them with a bit of sweat, creativity and willpower. She rocks the power tools! I encourage you to take a browse around her site and see what gems you uncover.

So, here are some questions I was asked to answer.

1) What am I working on right now?
Um, the answer is EVERYTHING! Our lives are kind of complicated right now – we’ve just spent a month living at the beach while our current home was being used as a display home. I took that opportunity to decorate the beach house, which is going to be used as a holiday rental by my husband’s company. It’s SO much fun decorating a whole house from scratch! I’ll be sharing the whole beach house reveal next month – but for now, I’ll cheekily scatter some teaser images throughout this post, just to whet your appetite for what’s in store. 😉

In addition to that massive project, we only have about two months left in our actual real house before we have to move out, so I’m getting everything ready for sale and finishing up rooms to photograph for you guys. It is BUSY!

I seem to have about fifty things on the go, but currently I’m working on painting some curtains for the living room (yes, painting! You read that right!), whipping up some DIY artworks, putting the final touches on my son’s room makeover… and yeah, I could go on. Every room in our house needs some love and attention so that it feels “finished.

But didn’t you just move into that house?? I hear you ask!

Well… yes. The plan was always to live here for only one year, just enough time to complete the land development my husband has been working on. Well, the land is now finished and up for sale – exciting times! So it’s almost time for us to move on to our next adventure.

Probably the breadth of topics I cover. I’ve noticed that a lot of bloggers seem to pick one defined area and only blog about that. For instance, solely interior decorating, or just organising, or only kids activities. In a way it’s a lot easier to grow a blog when you have laser focus like that – because the audience you attract knows what to expect, and they will stay with you as long as the topic stays the same.

This blog is a little different. My theme is “the art of making home” – which covers a lot of areas of creative home-making, whether it be entertaining kids, stencilling a wall, organising a cupboard or whipping up something tasty for dinner.

I think it’s probably been harder to gain traction, because while I might gain a lot of new followers through a decorating post that gets featured somewhere, some of those drop off once I post a kids craft activity. I’ve done a lot of soul-searching about that. It would be easy for me to write a decorating blog – it’s what I “do” as my on-the-side job, and I have plenty of material, more really than I have the time to blog about it. And those posts always seem to be by far the most popular of anything I post. But for me, it comes back to the purpose in why I’m doing this. Which leads me to the next question…

3) Why do I write/ create what I do?
When I started out, I always knew I wanted to write a blog for women like me – stay-home mums looking for inspiration to live creatively at home with their kids.

My audience has grown to include women of all different ages and backgrounds – working mums, stay-home mums, newlyweds with no kids, single women, empty nesters – which I LOVE. On the other hand, I do worry a bit when I post something really kid-focused, because those type of posts are the most polarising – you either have kids and are interested in the topic, or you don’t. I’m such a people-pleaser and I do struggle with that. And as someone who experienced infertility myself, I worry that I might be offending or hurting someone who followed along for the decorating posts and wasn’t expecting to be hit with kid stuff.

But I’m trying to come to terms with the fact that I can never please everyone, all the time. In fact, the best advice I’ve ever been given is to picture just ONE person as the audience I’m writing for. For me, that’s someone pretty much like myself: a mum who wants to live her most creative life at home with kids.

If you don’t fit that exact category, I’m in no way saying you’re not welcome here – far from it!! Some of my most loyal and valued readers don’t fit inside that box. It’s really just a visualisation that helps to give me focus, remember why I’m doing what I’m doing, and feel less apologetic about blogging the way I do. And along the way, I hope to give inspiration to a whole range of women who desire to live their most creative life, no matter what stage they’re at in life’s journey.

4) How does your writing/ creating process work?
It looks a bit like this:
1. Get ideas… heaps of ideas! Crazy amounts of ideas! Ideas for projects I’d love to tackle, kids activities I’d love to try, recipes to experiment with, decor and design improvements I’m itching to make.
2. Buy supplies for twelve different projects
3. Start about eight different things at once
4. Finish five of them
5. Blog about one.

Yeah…. I’m not even kidding. My hard-drive is brimful of projects I’ve completed and photographed that still haven’t seen the light of day on this blog. And my garage is full of supplies I still haven’t used for projects I still haven’t gotten to.

It’s not that I’m being lazy – I’ve been working as hard as I can, late into the night almost every night of the week, and I feel like I’m still barely scratching the surface of what needs to be done. For non-bloggers, I know that’s really hard to understand. I used to scratch my head when people said they were working 30-40 hours a week on their blog, and wonder…. doing what, exactly??

Well, now I get it. I started trying to explain here exactly what’s involved in my blogging process, so it would make a little more sense to you – but it got so long-winded I made it into a separate post. 😉

In fact, I’ve recently made a big decision about the way I handle my time, and I’ll be spilling the beans to you guys in that upcoming post as well. Don’t worry – it’s exciting! Hopefully it will mean more fresh content up on the blog on a more regular basis for your reading enjoyment. I can’t wait to tell you all about it.

So that’s me and my little blog in a nutshell. If you’re new here, here’s a couple of projects to give you a bit of a feel for what I do:

And now it’s time for me to pass the baton forward. I’d like to highlight three fabulous bloggers.

That’s it from me for today. Let’s chat: why are you here? For the decorating posts? Kids posts? A combination of everything in between? How did you find me? I’d love to know your thoughts.

Pssssst – If you want to make sure not to miss out on my beach house reveal…. take a second and subscribe below to receive my upcoming posts by email!