I found my haven in Atlanta

I went away for about five days last week and headed to Atlanta, Georgia for a bloggers’ conference called Haven. It was a conference specifically for home décor/DIY bloggers and it was just like its name – a haven! It’s hard to describe the camaraderie of bloggers. It’s something that most of us bloggers can’t really share or talk about much with even our close friends or family because they don’t understand the lingo, the online relationships, and the hours and hours and hours it takes to run a blog, and usually get bored hearing us talk about HTML, stats, and SEO. So staying up until 1 AM to talk and chat at the conference was pretty normal for all of us and worth the lack of sleep we all got.

Top Left: my new polka dot bag. Bottom Left: reading material on the plane. Right: My love note I found in my suitcase from my sweet Rachel.

What did I learn about? Well, there were lots of classes you could take. I specifically wanted to learn about SEO, running a blog better, PR, advertising, making money, photography, photo styling, blog design, and furniture painting. There were so many more classes I didn’t even get to like: thrifting, decorating 101, furniture building, and many more.

I have a HUGE to-do list now for this blog and that is going to take a lot of extra time to get through that list to make OMF better. To help you better understand what it takes to run a blog, each post that you see {three days each week} takes me an average of 5+ hours to put together. Surprised? Well, it does. I have to DO the project. I have to take photos WHILE I’m doing the project. I have to write the post. I have to edit the photos. I have to edit the post. Plus, there’s all the social media and link parties to get my blog known so you can find my organizing ideas! There’s emailing with companies for advertising and giveaways, answering emails and comments from my lovely readers. You can see, it’s nearly become a full time job for me – remember I’m also a piano teacher with 15 students! Oh, and did I mention I have a family and home to run, too? Well, I know what it’s like to work because I’m about up to full time work hours, as you can see. But, I LOVE it – I absolutely LOVE to blog. I work every spare minute I can – just ask my husband and friends!

Top Left: Allison Hepworth. Top right: Beckie Farrant. Bottom Left: Andrea. Bottom Right: Anna, my roommate at Haven.

Now…enough about all that blog stuff and why I love it. Let me tell you about some amazing ladies I met and whom you might like to get to know. My roommate was Anna, of Ask Anna. She and I are both Christians and we both love organizing and decorating. We were a great fit as roommates. She is more of the “cleaner” than me – I just like to organize everything, I’m not so much the germ-a-phobe, which she’ll readily admit to. She and I are both from California and have been to each other’s houses, too! We had lots of late night talks and never seemed to run out of things to talk about.

I also got to see my friend {whom I roomed with at Blissdom}, Allison from House of Hepworths along with some of her Texan friends that she roomed with, Beth {of Freestylin.com} and Jamie {of C.R.A.F.T}. They were just sweet ladies and I got to talk a lot with them. FYI - I didn't take nearly enough pictures because I'm terrible at taking "people pictures" and usually just take pictures of stuff! So this is what I have...

I made fast friends with sisters Vanessa and Heather from AtThe Picket Fence. I had never been to their blog before and I can’t understand why. They have some great stuff and are amazingly good at what they do. We laughed and talked for hours about so much stuff!

Brittany, the Pretty Handy Girl, and I became friends at Blissdom in Nashville, and I had the privilege of joining her {on the day after our conference was over} at a Habitat for Humanity Restore in Atlanta. She spoke about recycling and restoring old items. She’s amazing and everyone loves to be around her – she’s definitely a people person. She can fix just about anything and has amazing tutorials on her blog about how to fix, make, and do so many things. I would recommend her as a great resource for all her great tutorials on DIY {especially geared for women}.

Then I got to meet Beckie with an “ie” – one of the most creative ladies I know who blogs at Infarrantly Creative {she’s also got two other blogs – Knock Off Décor and Road Kill Rescue}! She is an amazing businesswoman as well as blogger. She has a great handle on how to do this whole thing and had great advice for us on that.

The trip to Atlanta was absolutely worth the lack of sleep, the time change, the lack of not eating enough, and having to be away from my family for a short time. But, I’m still a wife and Mom, first, and it is good to be home with my family. It’s hard to balance working from home as a blogger and being the “COO” {chief operating officer} of your household. I hope that you will begin to see changes on the OMF blog that you like. To start, I re-wrote my “about me” page. I’m hoping to update my home tour page soon, too, but it takes a ton of time to do that so I’ll let you know when that happens.

I’m also going to be helping you with organizing your kids {and making your life a little calmer, hopefully} in a whole different way as I am partnering with Positive Parenting Solutions for a FANTASTIC webinar that she is hosting next month. If you’ve never heard of this site, I’m going to tell you more soon about it and, trust me, when I talk about having a calm and organized home, this is going to help a lot of Mommies with all of her great advice. I look forward to another great year of blogging and motivating all of you to organize!!!