When I announced I’d be cutting back on Land of Marvels travel posts, a few of you asked that I still touch in and offer some personal life updates along the way to keep you informed of everything going on behind the scenes around here. And while I’ve been posting a bit sporadically lately, I thought it was time to update you on everything in my world as of late, and it’s been a bit chaotic, so here we go!
Life + Everyday
I’ve been way busier with Le Reve Artisan Macarons than I was expecting and that’s great, but it’s taken a bit of a toll on my schedule. Add to that helping my grandparents move out of their house in Salem, about an hour away from me, working on design projects and all around general life upkeep and I’ve been going going going for a while. We are headed out on vacation next week though, which leads me to my next section and I’m oh so excited for a weeklong break.
Travel
When we canceled our Spring trip in March, we rebooked two trips with the points and miles we got back and part 1 of those rebooked trips is coming up next week when we’ll escape to Paris and the South of France for a lovely week of croissants, rosé in the sun and an all around French vacation. I am counting down the days until our break and can’t wait to share all about our trip when I get home here on LOM! So watch for all things French in posts coming in mid-July.
We’re also heading to Hawaii in August as well as some trips to Southern Oregon and from here on out until the end of the year, we’ve got a lot on the calendar for travel again after a 6 month hiatus and I’m so excited to get back into the swing of things.
Also on the travel horizon, we’ve been working on figuring out our destinations for the beginning of next year and I’m super excited to start planning our trips with a US focus next Spring, including a foodie weekend in Las Vegas, a 10 day road trip through Utah, Arizona and California seeing all the national parks we’ve long wanted to get to including Bryce Canyon, Monument Valley, Zion and Death Valley. We’ll also be doing a city weekend somewhere in the Spring to either Chicago, Philadelphia or NYC that we’re working on looking into. But in short, we’re super excited to experience some of the US spots we’ve been putting off next Spring!
House Renovation
We’ve also been hard at work on projects on our 1925 Dutch Colonial house that we bought last August. And now that the weather is consistently warm and sunny, we’ve been knocking off a lot of projects we’d been putting off due to weather or just due to schedule. Lately we’ve tiled and grouted our fireplace hearth, painted and restyled the downstairs bathroom, painted our garden retaining wall and generally spruced up the exterior garden area of our yard, done a ton of maintenance to our back yard and are currently working with our handyman on a few other projects like door replacements and changing out a few remaining light fixtures. I’m also knee deep in redesigning our kitchen, working on the drawings for the the renovation and working on getting quotes for the project which we’ll tackle sometime in the next 6-8 months. To say the least, the last couple months have been crazy busy with work on our house and it’s really starting to feel more and more complete for what we want to accomplish with this property. This is by far the biggest house flip project we’ve worked on (and when I say flip, we generally stay in our properties a few years and renovate while living there, then sell and move on to another project) and while it’s a ton of work, we’re enjoying how everything is turning out!