the end of 2015 and the beginning of 2016
Emily Oster
Happy New Year! Its hard to believe the holiday season is over and my two week vacation has ended. While I tend to experience a little bit of post holiday blues, this year I am actually looking forward to a calmer January and February.
A quick recap of our holiday schedule - on the 23rd we left for Northern Michigan and made the 10+ hour drive north. It rained the whole drive..... We arrived to a very warm, no snow in sight Harbor Springs. The lack of snow required some re-adjusting from our usual course of activities and traditions but we managed to find new things to do and just enjoyed the time to relax and spend time together. On the 28th, we got a nice big snow storm just before Jeff had to drive back to Missouri to work for the week....I ended up staying north a few more days and finally returned to Saint Louis this past Friday to spend the New Years weekend with Jeff and Jeff's parents who were visiting from Chicago.
That brings us to today - the 4th of January 2016! Before launching into the New Year, I would like to use today's post to look back on some of the more notable events of 2015.
The biggest happening of 2015 at THE PLACE HOME was definitely the complete relaunch of the website in August. It took almost the whole summer to design, plan, organize, build and relaunch but it has totally been worth all the effort. The site now represents the business in its entirety as well as beautiful images of our home and I couldn't be happier with it.
Speaking of our home, this past year we tackled a pretty sizable list of projects that I shared about here on the blog.
- Laid new flooring in the office and guest room (formerly known as the project room)
- Painted and had a custom cabinetry piece installed in set guest room
- Refinished our stairs and added a runner
- Installed new lighting in our upstairs and downstairs hallways (realizing just now that I never shared pictures of these two projects...ops)
- Had our basement flood several times resulting in the installation of a sump pump
- Purchased our dining room chairs with some help of my parents and friends who transported them from Michigan
- Flipped our living room with our dining room creating a much better layout for our first floor
- Scored amazing antique twin bed frames for our second guest room
- Had our jungle of our yard totally cleaned up - complete with new landscape beds and grass (a project that I keep meaning to post about here but have yet to do so)
- Purchased a new sofa for our living room
- Continued to plan and redesign our first floor renovation
Finally just before the years end, we purchased an amazing antique brass bed on Craigslist for our other guest room. Listing it all out makes it feel like we have done a lot but also that we have so many more projects to go. My mind is just running wild with what we can tackle in 2016.
Two other big highlights from the year are the TPH feature in Sauce Magazine and Ladue News.
I want to conclude today's post with a big thank you to all the readers and clients who made 2015 such a great year for THE PLACE HOME. Here's to 2016!