How It All Started

I was updating my “about section” on my Facebook platform this morning and I took a fun trip down memory lane. I thought since I’m in the biz’ of letting y’all know a peak into my heart, I would share a bit about how this blog got started. So ready? Grab a coffee, or something that soothes your lips and buckle up for a maybe long read, haven’t decided on that yet..

As a young girl, I had a pretty immaculate room. I remember specifically in grade 10, styling my moms antique chest behind my bed with old vintage trays, candles and trinkets that I had found in the storage room. A little back story on my family, we have a lot of Antiques. We own land up North that had been founded in the late 1800’s by my Great Great Grandfather and still to this day, we have a lot of the items that they obtained over time. My home as well as my moms home is filled with these vintage and antique goodies. Take for instance this crate that so many of you drool over. It’s one of the many pieces of my families heirlooms. Most would call this trash, we call this treasure.

On my moms side of the family, my other grandparents also call trash treasure & my Grandpa was actually the owner of The Campbell River Auction for over 30 years. Still to this day he finds me decor that I can’t find anywhere.  Their home is filled with a story too!

 

Okay, I’m sorry for kinda going off on a tangent there. Something you will know about me is that my blogging is all over the place. I don’t have great spelling, I don’t have great grammar and I don’t spell check ( I’m sorry ). I don’t blog to be correct, I blog to share my love for decor & thankfully so many of you have bypassed the awful spelling.

So lets get back to my childhood, shall we? So, I loved decorating with old decor and furniture I found laying around the house and trust me, there was lots. My mom is organized and tidy, but she is a slight pack rat ( which I’m so so so thankful for – don’t be offended mom) because without her, I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to  fall in love with chunky, chippy, old decor at such a young age. Most people wouldn’t take a second look at her decor and pull it out of the rubble and make beauty out of it. But almost every one who walks into any of my moms homes compliments her on her style and how down-to-earth & cozy her homes have been over the years. I contribute my style and love for Interior Design solely to my mom.

It’s funny because she claims that she can’t  decorate and that she “needs me to come help her” but she really put the fire in me from such a young age & does such an amazing job at designing her own home.

Okay, so now that I’ve laid the foundation for why I love home decor, lets move into how it started.

Once I moved out into my own home, I had to buy all my own furniture and decor. Now, when you first move out on your own, you kind of just buy the cheapest thing you can find and at the time, this was Ikea. Lets be real, Ikea isn’t ideal… but I made it work. Back then there wasn’t Pinterest.. so I had no idea how to make over Ikea pieces and make them into Farmhouse goodies.

I specifically remember finding this old barn wood coffee table on Craigslist for 80 bucks when I lived in the Downtown core. It was a score. It gave my living room so much character. From that day on, I knew that I couldn’t follow the trend of modern or contemporary, I had to follow my heart and decorate my home with all the farmhouse, country goodness. This was back in 2008 and I have never looked back.

My style has slowly evolved since then into “Modern Farmhouse” as I like to call it.

 

So how does this have anything to do with how my blog started? It does, I promise and I did warn you this would be long, didn’t I?

In January of 2016 I decided to start blogging about our many DIY projects around the home and my Home Decor. I could tell that my Facebook friends weren’t  digging me  continually posting about my home and projects on my Facebook, so I thought I would start to blog to a crowd I didn’t have yet in hopes that maybe one day, someone would love what I have to say.

Apparently people loved what I had to say, only a few short weeks of starting to blog, my images were pinned and going viral on Pinterest and thousands of visitors were coming to my little website from around the world.

Four short months later, I had already worked with some big brands like: Home Depot, RugsUSA, The Land Of Nod, Mountain Buggy and many many others. I had been featured by big names like Ana White, Shanty2Chic, Rogue Engineer and many others. My projects also hit over 4 million views on Hometalk.

To be honest, I haven’t even really thought about the success of my little blog up until today. This year I have renewed another collaboration with The Land Of Nod, Stikwood and many other big names.

So where am I now?

In January of 2017, I really wanted to do something for myself. I wanted to take the stress of my husbands       business off of his shoulders someday if I can & I enrolled myself in school at The Interior Design Institute. I pray one day we can live solely on my income and that Glen can build for fun.. one can dream, right? I’m also offering E-Design at a discounted rate. I’ve so far done two rooms for a wonderful client who somehow keeps hiring me again ( so so so thankful ). I won’t be posting images of her home, but here is a little mock up I did for fun.

Seeing as it has officially now been 14 months since I started my home decor & DIY Blog, I kind of wanted to take you down memory lane and show you my favourite blogs of the last year.

 

Now that I took you all down memory lane, I gotta go chase my two year old into bed as she’s made quite the disaster in her bedroom.

As always, I’m so grateful for every visit, every comment, every share. I’m blessed to have so  many of you like what I have to say, even though half the time it’s filled with spelling mistakes and half the time I don’t make sense! So thank you!