Hi everybody, it’s Mera and Katie writing together thanks to our mobile communication devices.  What’s the occasion you ask?  It’s Red House West’s half birthday!  At 6 months in we’re obviously still newbies to the blogging scene, but we definitely get a thrill seeing the 79 posts (80 counting this one) we have banked in the archives.   We thought we would celebrate by giving you a peek behind the blog curtain into some of the things we see and do each day. We recently got this helpful comment and we’ve decided to heed the advice, so expect some big changes around here:

I read a lot of interesting articles here. Probably you spend a

lot of time writing, i know how to save you a lot of work, there is an online tool that creates unique, google friendly posts in minutes, just search in google 

Just kidding! We moderate all the comments we get here, sparing you the vast amount of spam that comes our way.  Every once in a while we get something hilarious, and it starts an absurd text conversation that goes back and forth all day. Like this:

If you aren’t home much, have children under

This was a comment left on one of our most popular posts that you’ll surely remember.  You know, the one about ferret husbandry.

We also get a lot of great positive reinforcement, like this encouraging comment:

What i don’t realize is in fact how you are now not

really a lot more smartly-appreciated than you might be right now.

You are very intelligent. You know therefore significantly in the case of

this subject, made me individually imagine it from a lot of varied angles.

Its like men and women don’t seem to be involved until it’s one

thing to accomplish with Lady gaga! Your own stuffs excellent.

Always deal with it up!

Why thank you!  We certainly do try to always deal with it up!

Also, not to go all Big Brother on you, but did you know that we can see the search terms that get people to Red House West? Here are a few good ones:

mera wearing without any clouth pitcher

i envisioned an upside down feather fan

what colour toothbrush holder free standing to go with grey wall tiles in bathroom

right end of the matte knife and the calico cat,

my house is too beautiful

What, you missed Katie’s post about how she envisioned an upside down feather fan?  Or the post when Mera decided to just own it, and posted a bunch of pitchers without any clouth on? Check the archives, they’re good ones.

And sometimes we learn things from the search terms that pop up, like this one:

benjamin moore vomit smell

Is that a thing?!  Seriously?  We’re going to Google that right now.

The WordPress-provided site statistics also give us a breakdown of where in the world people are when they click over to Red House West.  Did you know that we’re international?  We’re totally trending in Slovenia:

Our blog redesign is underway (hooray!  we’re excited for a site that is both more user-friendly and more beautiful), and we can’t wait to roll out the new look.  More on this as the debut approaches, but for now we’re refining what, exactly, our style is.  You might remember this post where we tried to define our decorating style, and now we’re trying to distill that down to a graphic style.

1, 2

We’ve definitely identified that we’re a 1970’s woodcut plus a paper floral collage, (it’s so obvious, right?)  but we’re still trying to figure out how to visually represent our friendship, which is really the driving force behind the blog. Any ideas? See above comments for examples of excellent constructive feedback.

In all seriousness though we’d love to hear your input about Red House West and our future look.  Talk to us!  On Wednesday Mera has the first in what we hope will be a recurring post here, answering reader’s design questions.  Come back and check it out!