Happy Blogiversary!

Today marks the 1 year anniversary of my blog!  One year ago today I started this blog with a reveal of our newly completed Master Bathroom project (click here to see)

and my painted Secretary desks (click here to see that first post!).

We had been in our new home for just 5 months and my mind was racing with ideas of things I could post about.  Thankfully the whirlwind slowed down and I don't have a "backlog" of ideas - now I just post as they come.  From the get go I decided I did not want blogging to feel like a "job."  I don't ever want to advertise on my blog or worry about getting posts out as often as I can for people.  I am trying to do my best to keep this blog fun for me with no stress involved!  I have always enjoyed sharing my decorating ideas and showing people my home and projects and this just gave me an easier way to do it.

At first all my visitors and comments were from local family and friends, but eventually I had readers showing up in Italy, Malaysia, and Canada.  Although I only had 2 followers (yes that's right :) I was getting an average of about 30 hits to my blog a day - and that amazed me.

THEN last October I came up with this idea - painting leather chairs with a stencil

And EVERYTHING CHANGED!

My blog up to that point had received a total of 5,000 hits.  As of today I have surpassed 100,000!  The main reason being, I submitted this project to different blogs that I like and many of them featured my chairs and sent me LOTS of traffic.  The first blog to feature them was "4 men 1 Lady" and I about had a heart attack when I received 5,000 hits in one day.  The next feature from "Emily A. Clark" brought 10,000 the next day.  As of Yesterday "Young House Love" featured them and sent me a record breaking 25,000 hits in one day (I can't imagine how they keep up with a blog that gets sooo much traffic!)  A big thanks to all the blogs that featured me and this project - so many kind comments and emails!  It has been crazy but fun!

So now my 2 followers has grown to 76 and my daily average is about 300 hits a day with visitors from all over the globe.  The top post visited is obviously the barstools with my "RH sofa table knock off" coming in at second.  Believe me when I say I know I am still "small time" but I kinda like it that way, and I never imagined one year ago when I started this blog that it would ever amount to even this much!

Thanks to all my Readers!!!!!  I am looking forward to another fun year of blogging!