First Blogiversary: Top 5 Posts

Are you ready for a countdown? These are the top five most popular posts for my blog in the first year, based on total number of page views. I'm a little surprised by the random mix of things that comprise this list. Here we go, starting at number five:

5. Renovating a Teen Boy's Bedroom

This bedroom redo took more time than I thought it would, but it was fun to pull together. The dresser shown above was a mildewed old relic I found in the basement, the lamp an Etsy find with a new spray-painted black Target shade. The round mirror was also left behind in the house. You can read more about it HERE, and part two is HERE.

4. Mid-century Modern Garden Trellis

I have no idea how this quicky blog post made from the Lowe's Garden Center and illustrated with a crappy over-exposed cell phone photo became number four on my greatest hits list, but this thing still gets plenty of views daily, even months after it was originally posted. The item is still available too! You can find the original post HERE, and the item HERE.

3. Colonial Revival: Revisiting Tradition in the 
    1930s
To be honest, I thought this post was a bit of a bore to anyone who wasn't a geek about architectural history or the owner of a Cape Cod. It was a lot of copy, and not a lot of photos, or at least not very good ones, and that's another no-no in blogland.

I took a bit of a walking tour in my own neighborhood, and reintroduced the ultimate "before" photo of my own Cape Cod, taken in April 2011 before I closed on the house.

Despite my misgivings about the post, it made it to number three. You can read about it HERE.

2. Searching for Garden Ideas

This is another post that surprised me with its popularity, and because really, I was flaunting the ugly and real. This is what my garden looked like this spring. I had no clue where to start, and I referred to the whole thing as a "white trash disaster." You can read about my floundering about HERE.

1. Twin Boys' Bedroom Part II

This post was the winner, with the most views of all the 170-odd posts on the blog this year. This one was also a little bit of a surprise to me, because most of the game plan of rescuing this truly awful room had to do with the basics: ripping out the bad, cleaning like people gone mad, paint, and decorating mostly with things we already had. You can read about it HERE, and the first installment of the two-parter is HERE. It's truly lovely to hear little boy voices floating down the stairs from this room, and knowing that they see it as their space to grow and create. I'm glad it won the top spot.