Getting Personal....Throwback Thursday Style
Oh my gosh you guys have I got a throwback for you today! As some of you might know, before I ventured into the world of commercial construction project management I used to do residential Interior Design.
As you can see, I've always been a fan of pink! ;)
For about 5 years I worked my tushy off doing mostly residential and some light commercial interior decorating and design work. Paint color consultations, window coverings, furniture plans and custom furniture were totally my jam and filled my days but after a tough year personally I decided to take a step back from my business. Business wise things were great, I'd been given a regular slot on a local morning TV show which brought in lots of interest and word of mouth was my number one referral. I had great clients and some really awesome projects on the go but I had lost some of my passion and found that the lack of work/life balance (when you're self employed the work never ends), personal stress and my creative frustrations were causing me to fall out of love with interior design, which had been a love of mine for as long as I could remember. I couldn't let this happen so, I made the difficult decision to take a step back, decline new clients, wrap up or refer elsewhere my current clients and just take a break to re-assess.
It was after this that I realized how much I needed to be creative, which ultimately led to the start of 204 Park. Because - and here's the throwback - part of what I loved so much about my business was my little design blog. When I started the i3 Style blog (i3 standing for Imagination, Inspiration and Innovation) I mostly started the blog because everyone I spoke to about business said "if you run a business, you better have a blog". So- a blog I started. I don't even know what my traffic was like (I either didn't understand how to figure that out at the time, or didn't care to), I had no idea who if anyone read my blog but I loved writing all kinds of posts from little DIYs, my homesense finds, snippets of projects I was working on to articles about different products and finishes.
Or you know....little gems like this in my Louis Vuitton Gone Wrong post! (YIKES!!)
To be totally honest, I haven't thought about i3 Style for so long that I had kind of forgotten about it until a friend of mine mentioned it to me a little while ago. It makes me laugh to look back at my old posts. Most of them are more than a little mortifying! Let's just say I'm glad I'm far more web and photo savvy now. Not to mention taking more time to proofread and edit (holy typo-s batman!)
So in honour of #throwbackthursday I thought it would be fun to poke a little fun at myself and my previous little blog i3 Style as a way of being thankful for my improved writing, editing, photo and web design skills! Hope you've enjoyed joining me on this little trip down memory lane. And what about all of you other bloggers out there- do you look back at your early blogging days and cringe too?!
