New Year’s Updates and Announcements

Hello and Happy New Year to all! I don’t know if it makes sense anymore to say I’ve been taking a blog break when I am breaking about as often as not, but in any case, it’s been a while. I hope everyone had a healthy, happy, and safe holiday season, that you shopped in your pajamas, that you ate the requisite amount (or more!) of pumpkin and peppermint things, and that you’re jazzed and ready to go for 2016.

I’m not sure whether I’m ready for it or not. I turned 30 in 2015, and I realized recently that I only ever really thought as far as the year when I turn 30. So 2016 feels like uncharted territory. It’s a new decade, and I’m excited and nervous to see what it brings.

So what have we been up to lately? Personally, I have been eating a lot of candy. And I’m not just saying that to make you feel better about what you’ve been eating. I feel like I need to confess it to someone. For someone over the age of about 12, it’s been a really astounding amount. But as far as the house goes (which seems a little more relevant to this particular venue), we have been working several labor-intensive and frankly not very exciting projects.

Like fixing this big patched area in our upstairs hallway.

And starting work on our front entryway, tearing out the tile and beginning to refinish the stairs.

I’m so excited for the green paint in the entryway. I’ve gone with more neutral paint in most of the house, and this little bit of drama feels exactly like what I’ve needed.

I’ve also been scraping popcorn wherever I can, which you can see on the hall ceiling above. Do I love the scraping? NO. I do not. The mess is crazy, and it makes me crazy. But the more I do it the more I realize that I gotta scrape it all. It makes that big of a difference.

So now that I’ve filled you in on what’s been going on around here (scraping, patching, tile demo, painting, candy eating) and justifying the break to myself if not to you, I want to mention a couple of things that are coming up on the blog horizon.

First of all, staring NEXT WEEK, I’m participating in an exciting New Year’s room refresh with a few other awesome bloggers.

Clearly I need to get motivated in the new year, and I’m really glad to have these ladies to get me moving in a meaningful direction. It’s the perfect time to do a little somethin’ somethin’ to cheer up a neglected space. Not all-out crazy time like I tend to do during these room makeovers (hello One Room Challenge) but something smaller-scale and more doable.

Finally–and this is the big one–though Jellybeans will remain my muse forever and always, I will be retiring White Dog Vintage and migrating to a new blog at the end of this month. I’ve been meaning to do this for a while but have hesitated to put a plan in action. Part of this been uncertainty about what I wanted to the new blog to look and feel like, but another big part of it has honestly been fear of losing all you lovely people who read here but–who knows?–may not make the leap with me to a new site. I’m staying with WordPress, so if you follow through WordPress or an RSS feed, you will automatically be following the new site when it switches over, but if follow through Bloglovin’, Feedly, Pocket, or another platform, you will probably have to add the new site with the new address, brittkingery.com (don’t bother checking it out just yet–there’s nothing there at the moment), and I hope you will.

I’ll be posting more about the move before it takes place, so you will have other reminders. But just to give a sneak-peek, here’s a look at the in-progress interface of the new site.

 

Nothing is set with it yet, and it doesn’t look super realistic because there isn’t any content in it, but I think I hope this gives you some idea of the direction the site will be heading. It’s a little more sophisticated and professional than the site I’ve been using, which I hope will get me feeling enthused to post here more often. Hey, it could happen! I read that people who love their blog design actually do publish more frequently. It could be true, or it could be a ploy to sell WordPress templates. In either case, I was clearly buying.

So that’s the update! Don’t forget to come back next week for the beginning of our room refresh challenge, and stay tuned for more new blog news.