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- How about a BIG dining room update?!
We are in the home stretch, people – and it’s getting VERY exciting!!
(Just in case you’ve missed the updates over the last few weeks – we kickstarted the new year by gutting our dining room! It was this whole process to tear all of the walls, remove the fireplace and the built-in china cupboard, pull down the ceiling and rip up the old floor – and we’ve been slowing working at re-building everything over the last few weeks!)
Derrick’s parents were here two weeks ago, and with their help we got the room well on it’s way to being put back together. It didn’t get all the way finished though, so Derrick’s Dad came down one more time this week to finish (the stuff that we couldn’t do on our own anyways). He trimmed all of the windows in, put up trim around our mini-split unit, cut our baseboards (we didn’t install them yet though – we left them free-standing so we could pull them away to paint!) AND he put together my new office space (!!) What used to be a built-in china cupboard is now my office nook and I am over-the-moon thrilled with how it looks!! Derrick’s Dad built in a desk for me, some hidden shelves, and then some nice big shelves at the top of the space – it looks fantastic!!
So, next week – we’ll get the walls and trim primed and painted and then we’ll OFFICIALLY be ready to move our dining room out of our living room and back into our dining room!!
In all total, it’ll have been about a 6-week process by the time we “finish” (if you had told me at the beginning of the year that it was going to take that long, I’m not sure if I would have believed you and I honestly might have had second thoughts about the whole project!) It’s been an “adventure” to say the least. Our dining room table has been in our living room for about 80% of that time – which makes doing school and eating dinner a bit challenging – but the end is in sight and we are SO excited! - So, this week’s Abby’s Saturday photo was not supposed to look like this – I was just planning to take a solo-picture of Abby. But as I was having her sit down in the middle of the room, the kids came over and joined her – without being asked! If Mama knows anything, she knows that when the kids volunteer to be in a photo – you just take it!
- Braelynn had asked, for her birthday, if she could invite “the girls” over for an afternoon. “The girls” are my twin cousins: Abby and Bekah (so they’re technically Braelynn’s second cousins). They are a little bit older than Braelynn – but she absolutely adores them and she really wanted to invite them over. So, on Tuesday afternoon, we made it happen and both Braelynn and Leander had a blast! Even though they’re a little older, Abby and Bekah are so sweet to my kids and they had so much fun painting, playing games, and spending time together.
- My BIG task for the week was been going through ALL of my images from 2022 and pulling my favorite images (from both my iPhone and “big” camera). I do this every year. I pull “the best of the best” for my “favorite” wedding, engagement, and portrait blog posts – which are coming up (now that it’s February!) And I also do it so that I have easily accessible images for social media. I pull my favorite personal images at the same time so that I can create our family yearbook from the previous year (this will be my 4th year in a row to make this book and I am SO excited!! 2022 was a FUN year for our family!) It’s a MASSIVE undertaking (as you can imagine). I literally take tens of thousands (maybe even more?) of images over the course of a year, so whittling it down to just a few hundred “favorites” is quite daunting.
Normally, I spread the task out and accomplish it in little bits and pieces here and there (so it isn’t so overwhelming). But I ALWAYS am done with that process by mid-late January. Well, newsflash, it’s now the beginning of February, and as of the beginning of this week, I had barely even started into this task. I was behind and that was leaving me feeling overwhelmed and (quite unlike myself) I just kept putting it off.
So, I asked my sister, Ruby, to come over on Monday to watch the kids for a bit so I could get a jump-start on the process. If I didn’t sit down and just dive in, I knew I was going to run into bigger problems. So, she came over (and the kids had an “Auntie Ruby Day”) and I got to work. I plowed through so many images on Monday – it gave me the momentum I needed to continue working through the rest of the week! And FINALLY on Thursday night – I FINISHED.
In total, I pulled 4,387 images (that includes both personal and business photos). WOW. That’s probably somewhere around 8-10% of the images I EDITED in 2022. What I mean by that is: after I take photos (whether it’s a wedding, engagement session, or us going to an amusement park) I come home, cull through and pull the best images, and I EDIT about 30-40% of what I take. When I’m go through this process of pulling my favorites – I only look through the images I EDIT (because I know those are the best anyways). So yeah, what can I say? I’m a photographer – that’s what I DO.
And this process (as crazy as it might be) of pulling my favorites every year equips me to actually do something with the images I take. I blog them, I post them on social media, I create our family yearbook – my images have a PURPOSE and I’m so proud of that!! - In other words: STAY TUNED! This week starts my “favorites” series!! I blog my favorite wedding and engagement images, my favorite portraits, and my favorite roller coaster images from 2022! (Don’t worry, I don’t blog 4,000+ photos – most of those photos are personal images that end up in our family yearbook – which YIKES is going to be bigger than ever this year! I have about 400 more images than I pull on average, so I’m slightly worried about that!)
