Perhaps you have noticed the changes around here and wondered what is happening. Perhaps you have noticed that the site has a cleaner, simpler look and that the shop is no longer a muddle of random little somethings I have taken a liking to? Maybe you have noticed the consistency with which I have been issuing the loveliest of prompts in the Brocantehome Living Room and have enjoyed the conversation this January?

Or perhaps you haven’t noticed anything at all? And that my friends is a good thing. These changes aren’t for you: though you will of course be experiencing them, no, rather they are for me in line with the word I chose for the year: consolidation.

Consolidation of who I am and what I want to offer at BrocanteHome. Consolidation of the myriad of systems that go on behind the scenes and the fifteen years of content I want to sort in to wheat and chaff. Consolidation of my life as the Mother of a school-age child as Finley enters the final term before he takes his GCSES, and consolidation of our life as a family as we make decision about how and where we want to live as Ste turns fifty in July, and I try to settle the never-ending itch deep within my domestic soul.

This strikes me as a momentous year. A year when I know the pressure to support my family as they too experience change, will be intense, and a year when decisions will have to be made that will impact us all, both individually and as a group.

Above all else, it feels like the culmination of much that I have been working towards and in the midst of it all, I know that looking after myself better will be key if only so that I don’t lose my marbles completely. In fact I suspect only way to do it is to take a long, hard look at routines and rituals long established and bit by bit to pull them apart and eventually consolidate them all so that together they aid rather than abet my ability to preserve needful energy and prioritise myself over the house and everyone it, in line with the ten principles of a life less ordinary.

I want now to be truer than true. To not have to navigate the flotsam of the life behind and instead to get to its very essence. The things that really matter to me, The bare bones routines that will both simplify and enhance my domestic life and the simple systems I can both commit to and enjoy in my professional life.

I am, as I have said so often, something of an information squirrel. I will investigate something for many a week, create something elaborate out of my research and then commit to it with heart and soul even when I know it is not working and is merely adding to the tyranny of obligation in my head and that of course is a nonsense we should not be tolerating in a life less ordinary.

And so to me, consolidation is key. Bringing together all that I have worked for in the last fifteen years, Enjoying the fruits of my labour and reducing all that I have in my life down to only that which is truly meaningful. The books I want you all to read, the banishing of blog posts that no longer mean anything to any of us and one membership, with just one price so I don’t have us all in a perpetual muddle!

You will over the next few weeks see changes to both the site and The Salon: all designed to give our journey clarity. And all in line with all that I discussed last year. Changes I know you have already seen with Yearbook, and will see again when the Yearbook Reflection Journal that will bookend each month arrives in your Salon Library. There will be new ways we can work together and the elimination of all that is not serving any of us. and above all else there will be simplification and consistency as I work towards creating a place on the web I hope you will continue to use to shape your days…

So here’s to change! To the slimming down of bottoms and systems, junk and dreams! Here’s to knowing what we want and recognising that almost everything else is just the kind of gravy drowning us daily. Here’s to believing that we will be more, when we want less, and that the consolidation of all that we have been creating over the years really is the key to progress in the spanking new decade ahead of us.

Here, my Darlings, is to us.

P.S: Do wish me good luck won’t you: Revision DOES NOT come naturally to a boy with a head full of lyrics, love and Doctor Who!

PUTTERY TREATS + PRETTY THINGS