All Kinds of New

It’s great to get back to normal after our house and website have been under construction for so long!  It’s not all the way done, but that’s just how it had to be with everything going on.  Let me give you a recap of our past few months:

In late January we found out that we were going to be featured in the Fall 2017 issue of American Farmhouse Style magazine!  This was when we had our whole master bathroom ripped out, and all the construction materials stored in our bedroom.  While we were getting excited and preparing to decorate for fall in the early spring, another magazine contacted us about using one of our bathrooms in their magazine.  So we tried to negotiate a deal by offering American Farmhouse Style the ripped out bathroom that we promised would be finished in time for the May 1 photo shoot.  Their editor had a lot of faith in us, because it was sight-unseen.

So, we did what we do best.  Do massive renovations on a small budget, all by ourselves, and expect the final product to be magazine-worthy.

Wouldn’t You Know It!

We did it, y’all (or “guys”, if you’re from the Pacific Northwest, like we are).  It was a miracle but it turned out uh-mazing.  And I am my worst critic when it comes to design.  More about this bathroom and how we did it later, but here’s a little preview:

Then we were advised by many wise people to get our ducks in a row before the magazine comes out in August.  This meant switching our blog to a full-blown professional website (meaning, you can pay for services/shop items on the website, among other things).  So we got started on this and and then marveled at how crappy our phone pictures looked on the sample site.  The site was too nice for our picture quality, and it was obvious.

A Miracle

Then a fantastic photographer from Harding University, Ashel Parsons, volunteered to come and shoot a massive array of portfolio pictures for us.  It was almost too good to be true.  There ended up being so many fantastic pictures that they’re still being sorted through and didn’t make it in time for the completion of the website.  There’s coming soon, though, so don’t judge us too harshly by the quality of pictures currently on the main page.  Here she is, in action!

And just before that, in the same week, Shannon Fontaine, a talented commercial photographer in Nashville came out to shoot our entire house for American Farmhouse Style.  It was a lot of hard work, but the pictures from him ended up being fantastic, too.  You won’t get to see those until the magazine is out, though.  More about the magazine shoot in a future post, but here’s a shot of what we were up to that day:

And if that weren’t enough, we changed real estate brokerages from Keller Williams to Nashville Realty Group and are really excited about the change.  It’s a smaller firm run by a husband-and-wife team just like Dave and me, and their (our) office is really close to home and beautifully designed.  It fits what we do with combining design and real estate.  More will be coming about that, too, as our real estate site gets switched over.

It has been so busy that I forgot to notice that my email went down for a week when I was waiting to hear from all kinds of important people, and there have been a million things to do to learn how to get this blog search-engine friendly and all that stuff that I don’t know how to do.  Dave is going to be studying up on that for me, or I would just say “no thanks” to the whole blog-business thing and go to my happy place where the coffee flows with milk and honey.

To that end, if you happened to email me and didn’t get a response, I probably didn’t get your email.  Could you try again, please?  Thanks.

I need YOU!

Can you help give my new website some love by signing up for the email list?  You’ll get blog posts plus extra things that aren’t on the blog, which will be really cool but are a surprise (meaning, I have yet to create them).  But sign up anyway, and then I will know that people are actually reading this.  Thanks.

Plus, check our our instagram/pinterest/facebook accounts!  You can use the buttons that are now obvious on this new site to follow us, and please do!  I will confess I have no knowledge about Pinterest whatsoever, but since it’s kind of a must-have for being visible as a design business, I’m going to give it a try.  If you have tips on growing a business on Pinterest and want to share them with me, send me an email at holly@hollythompsonhomes.com.  But in the meantime, we do have some boards up already, so follow us so we don’t feel bad about being new at it.

And, if you’re one of those referrer/tell your friends/support small businesses people, would you mind posting/sharing about our new website somewhere?  I don’t even know where to ask you to share it because we’re actually that social-media-deficient, so maybe you could just post it wherever you’re willing to and know that we’re incredibly grateful.

Thanks so much to all of you who are following along!  I really appreciate you!