Lapse in Archive

I regret not keeping up on this “home journal” as thoroughly as I would have liked to the last few years. Our family doubled. Our yard work quadrupled. Work got crazy-fun. And then also, I watched this blogging “industry” change into a radically amplified version of its good ol’ self with multi-channel strategies, niche categories, an endless cycle of expected community promotion opportunities, an inundation of sponsorship requests that are off-topic, and obvs, the living rooms and bedrooms miraculously overhauled every season. The environment became something I didn’t like, but I wish it hadn’t driven me away. My own blog took a backseat, and to some degree it was for good reason (sanity and bandwidth with a young family) but now, when I look back on the site, there’s lots of good stuff missing. So much of the neat work that I did for HGTV and DIY I’d still love to link to from here. I’ve done lots of mini home improvements that have changed our home in functional and notable ways, too. My old home and lifestyle was very well-documented, but I wish I had somehow found the time to share more details of my amended life along the way, too, just for myself. One small saving grace to my archive-loving soul is that I kept up with Instagram.

I’ve always been some kind of journalist. Not in the sense of published lit, but I’ve always collected and assembled visual journals in some form. Lots of photos. Captions and notations. It was during and after college I found it easy to write in a free-flowing manner, especially when stifled by core curriculum and working at a job where I wasn’t happy. Creative writing became an outlet that was great for a long time.

I still print and collect photos; they’re individually labeled and organized quite simply by season in basic photo boxes (I print about 1,000/year). I have photo albums from my middle- and high-school years that documented snapshots of every single day, chronologically, even when they were just minute details. It feels natural to get back towards some iteration of that with more frequent posts, loose project overviews, general notes that make it easier for us to recall what we were doing now, whether it’s next winter, or 5, 10, or 20 years from now.

Our kitchen is a huge overhaul that’s scheduled to begin in July, so that gives me a month to catch you up on it and fill in some gaps in the timeline to improve the overall journal. This is a cool little life we’ve carved out for our family, and I don’t want to let myself forget some of the small details anymore.

See you again soon.