How Long It Takes to Do Something

oh mina i hear you! those first months are so, so hard and disorienting and relentless. i felt like i had been swallowed up. but i promise you will feel like yourself again. with toby, on his first birthday, i remember feeling like myself again. sending you a big hug. xoxo

thank you so much for your note! we’d love to do a post like this! yes, we moderate every comment that comes in — we share the job during the workdays, and i often moderate again a couple times during the evening/early morning/weekends. we approve almost all comments (and welcome respectful debate), but just leave out ones that are overly harsh, inaccurate, etc.

for something like david’s house tour, for example, i knew his apartment was great because we’ve been friends for years (i remember i actually went over there for drinks on my 30th birthday 10 years ago!), and i reached out in january to see if he’d be up for a tour. he was into it (yay!). our regular interiors photographer was out on maternity leave, so i hired the wonderful stephen kent johnson, whom my friends erin and linsey had highly recommended, and arranged the shoot date/time and gave stephen overall art direction. sadly i was out of town during the shoot, so david and stephen did the shoot on their own and had a wonderful time, according to both of them! a week later, stephen sent the photos, which were really beautiful, and i thanked and paid him. the next step was to set up a phone interview with david. before interviewing him, i read a few other interviews he’s done over the years to get an even deeper sense of his story/aesthetic/background (this is especially helpful when you don’t know the person). we talked for about an hour and a half, and then i condensed/edited down the interview into short, tight blurbs. then i edited down the photos (stephen had sent more than what appear here — it was hard to cut down!) and arranged them into the post with the blurbs, moving around the blurbs to fit the photos and flow of the story. i also emailed david some follow-up questions, like the question about which TV shows/movies he likes. we then resized the photos to fit our site specs so they’re not blurry and renamed them for SEO purposes. at that point, we usually scout and add house tour credits (for furniture, decor items, paint colors, etc.) but since david mostly shops vintage, we didn’t have many to do for his tour. then i had another editor read over the post with fresh eyes, and we addressed any bumps/questions. finally, we formatted the post, coded it up and pushed it live! :) then we promoted it on social, sent the link to david and stephen and a few other friends, and began moderating and answering comments.

it looks easy (and should look easy) but it’s actually a careful, multi-step process to produce any of our posts. i remember once reading a comment from someone who thought homeowners just emailed in photos and blurbs themselves — which would be awesome, haha — but it’s actually much more carefully produced on our end. hope that helps answer some of your questions! thank you for asking! xoxooxxo