Last week marked one year since we stepped away from our blog. We left without knowing exactly what would happen next, and we certainly didn’t expect the continued outpouring of support, curiosity, and encouragement we’ve received from you over the past year. Before anything else, thank you — truly. Your messages, comments, and check-ins have meant more than we can fully express.
We’ve gotten so many questions about what we’ve been doing that we’ve been trying to figure out the best way to share a clear, honest update. There have been plenty of ideas tossed around — including Sherry’s joke about a Real Housewives-style freeze frame with text updates next to our faces — but we wanted something that would actually tell the story without stretching into an unwieldy 3,000-word post.
Last month we recorded an episode for Jess Lively’s podcast, and when that aired we realized it offered a thorough, natural way to explain the last year. Hearing our voices captured the nuance — the tone, inflection, and little details — that written words sometimes miss. If you prefer listening, that episode gives an in-depth recap of what we’ve been up to and why we made the choices we did.
We realize an hour-long podcast is an investment of time, but it really covers a full year for us and we tried to be open about a lot of topics, including:
- why we decided to step back from regular blogging
- what our day-to-day work looks like now
- how our approach to style and design has changed
- how the kids and family are doing
- things we wish we had handled differently while we were blogging
- how this transition has affected our family life and priorities
If you’d rather read than listen, we’ve summarized many of the same points below, but first a few highlights from the past year: we’re working on multiple new houses, we’ve shifted how we think about renovation timelines and budgets, and we’ve been intentionally slowing the pace so we can focus on family and meaningful work instead of constant content creation.
Along the way there have been plenty of lighthearted moments too — small personal evolutions like my reluctant embrace of spandex for workouts, and Sherry’s unexpected dance floor bravado — and those glimpses of real life are part of why we enjoy sharing updates when we can.
Since stepping back from regular blogging, a lot of our home updates have happened more intentionally and at a slower pace. That shift allowed us to approach projects with more care, and some of the rooms finished during this time are among our favorites — like the dining room and the living room, which were completed in a different, more relaxed way than in the fast-paced days of posting daily updates.
We also completed updates to several other spaces — the guest room, the garage, the hall bathroom, and a half-bathroom that may be our favorite small project. Many of these spaces appear in our new book, which has been a major focus for us over the past year. We’re proud of how the book turned out and excited to share it. Publishing it has given us a chance to reconnect with readers in person during the upcoming book tour and to celebrate projects we love in a more deliberate way.
We’re looking forward to meeting many of you on the tour and continuing to share updates on social media and, occasionally, here on the blog. We won’t promise a set posting schedule — life is more flexible now — but our home projects continue, just at a steadier, more intentional pace. For example, we still haven’t started our kitchen renovation yet, though we finally agreed on a floor plan and hope to begin after the tour.
After several thoughtful and sometimes heavy conversations over the past months (which come through in the podcast), we also wanted to balance the serious moments with something lighter. So to end on a playful note: there’s a short video that captures some of the sillier, more human parts of this whole ride — proof that we don’t take ourselves too seriously all the time.
You can find the podcast episode and the short video by searching for our names and “Young House Love” on your preferred podcast or video platform. We appreciate your ongoing interest and look forward to sharing more, in whatever form fits our lives best.