Survey Results, & Resolving A Reader Complaint!

I think I have the best readers in all of the blogging world! THANK YOU so very much to everyone who took a moment to take the Shine Your Light survey and share your likes, dislikes and thoughts on the kind of content you want to see on this blog! Your feedback was fantastic, and some of your sweet comments literally brought tears to my eyes. The responses were anonymous but I wish I could give you all a hug and thank you in person. I appreciate you all so much!

I’ve been blogging since March 11, 2010 (one of these days I’ll tell you how that day is hugely significant to me and how my corny blog name was born). Way back when I started, I blogged about home and garden, food, family life, kid crafts and projects, travel and restaurant reviews, and just about everything else under the sun that struck my fancy. There was so much more of me, my heart and my family on the blog back then.

Since I’ve started blogging, there have been some curveballs thrown into our grand plan to renovate this house top to bottom, because you know, life happens and priorities change. These lights of my life have gone from elementary school to high school and now our firstborn is in college in Vermont. Our daughter is a senior and dreams of heading to school in the south. The baby is now 15 and with us for a couple more yearsthank God before heading off to college too and our sweet, slobbery pup has long since taken a trip over the Rainbow Bridge.

It’s CRAZY how much transpires in 1 year, 5 years, 8 years!! Right? In your life and in mine.

All this to say I am still DIYing my little heart out and doing what I can to update our house with a bit of ingenuity and a LOT of blogger friends’ tutorials and Google to help me along the way. I am happy many of you are still along for the ride since the beginning, and so many more of you have joined our friendly community through the years. It’s truly a joy to me to be able to provide this humble little idea-sharing slice of the internet.

So let’s talk about how this blog has evolved and what you all want to see here!!

 

FAVORITES…..

#1 a tie!  85% & 84% of you respectively love

Home improvement projects and DIY decor projects!

#2 Quick tips and tricks

#3 Furniture makeovers and builds

#4 Recipes (Really? Who knew!)

#5 Room design boards

#6 Outdoor & gardening

#7 Tablescapes & entertaining

#8 Art projects

 

AND THE #1 LEAST FAVORITE……

Craft projects!

 

Some of this was news to me – based on the kind of traffic I receive from Pinterest I’m surprised art projects aren’t higher up on the list. 

Visit the art gallery here.

 

I am NOT a food blogger or photographer, and you can see that in my old blog posts! However, I used to post a weekly recipe on the blog for years and some of you from the early years really enjoyed that, so I’ll try to bring you some more food and drink at least once a month (because as you may know, we LOVE to eat and drink around here!)

Low fat chocolate spoon cake

 

Room designs boards are typically my least commented, but highly visited and pinned posts, and a few of you have emailed me about how much you enjoy them and if they are coming back, so that is something I will bring back again this year on occasion. I love that some of you find some inspiration from these.

See all the design boards here.

 

What else? Home improvement and DIY decor projects will abound this year!

SEAN’S ROOM –  it’s high time I update you on Sean’s room makeover which got stalled thanks to round 2 of the flu, and a cold January that prevented me from building in my very cold garage! There are some fun projects going into this little space and we’re seriously fired up about how it’s coming together!

 

HALF WALL & PILLAR – You may have seen on Instagram stories a while back that this area is getting a little moulding love! I’ll fill you in on that makeover later this week……

 

THE DINING ROOM – I keep putting bandaids on this space until the day “we do our kitchen”. How many times have I mentioned our kitchen renovation that never materializes? The problem with putting the kitchen off again and again that it also affects what we do with our floors and the wall between the kitchen and dining room, and I don’t want to invest money into a space that we’re eventually going to rip out or reconstruct.

However – the holes in our dining room ceiling from can lights we removed when the light fixture was installed? THAT I think I can improve – maybe even do something awesome with, yes?? This whole room has been waiting for it’s day to come and it’s a project I’m SUPER excited to tackle this spring!!

 

FLOORS – Oh our sad floors!! They are a HUGE priority! Despite not doing the kitchen anytime soon, we hope to rip out the linoleum in our current kitchen and the 80s tile in the foyer and replace them with hardwoods to match the living room, dining room and family room, which are in desperate need of refinishing.

Part of that project will definitely be DIY and I will be sure to share step-by-step tutorials along the way.

I also have two good furniture makeovers to share in the near future, and a bunch of small home improvement projects that you could implement in your own house with short time!

 

Now my dear readers, I need to address something that came up in the survey that is really bumming me out…..

READER COMMENTS

One of my lovely readers who took the survey mentioned that you’ve asked a few questions in comments and never get a response from me, so I wanted to take a minute here to address this.

I truly appreciate every single comment readers leave here and, unless some catastrophic event has occurred in my life,

I RESPOND TO EACH AND EVERY COMMENT.  

I have made this a practice for years upon years, and sometimes it takes me a while if a post has a lot of comments or I have a lot going on in my life at the moment, but this blog is my own little community and it would be nothing without all of you. I am glad to answer your questions if you have any, and to communicate with you! (especially when I get such nice comments like this one from Sharon!)  

 

For the last two or three years my responses have been posted under each comment on a post, and they are emailed directly to the commenter if their email address is left. Sometimes emails from blogs end up in JUNK or SPAM folders and probably never seen or opened, and in that case, unless you come back to the blog and look through the comments you’d probably never know I responded to you.

If you leave me a question here either in comments or via email, and you don’t hear back within a few days, look in your email junk or spam folder, and if I haven’t gotten back to you, by all means email me again! lisashineyourlight(at)gmail(dot)com  Without a doubt I could miss responding to someone (particularly if, like I said, a major life event is occurring), but know that it is my intention to do so and I hope you give me a nudge again if I leave you hanging!

 

Okay that’s it for today sweet friends…now that I threw down this huge list of 2018 to-dos I best get to work!

Have a wonderful week ahead and thank you as always for your visits here! I adore you all!