WE BUILT A SWING 🛠️ THIS WEEKEND (And Fixed A Little Bit Of Everything Else)

So we spent this entire weekend outside.

All of us. Baby included, which if you've ever tried to weed a garden with a one-year-old "helping," you already know exactly how inefficient that made things.

The summer was packed (as most are when you have teenagers) with SPORTS.

That meant we had minimal time to enjoy or UP-KEEP our gardens. The decision to turn our space into something we could share meant we had a lot of work to do.

We ripped out weeds, tore apart garden beds that I wasn't vibing with, hauled wood, cleaned up years of stuff nobody deals with until company's actually coming.

And company is coming. Our first guests are booking in for family photos soon, and somewhere between the weeding and the fourth trip to the burn pile, it hit me what we're actually building out here.

It's not just "make it pretty for photos." Anyone can style a corner and make it look good for thirty seconds.

My son asked me, "Why are you doing ALL of this...?" and as I looked around at the mess of a garden I was dealing with I thought, what is our why?

Now let's pause for a second and remember I have NEVER gardened before, and now I am trying to dig up plants and gently replant them.

What I thought were maybe tulip leaves were.. Iris's.

And I had a vision that we somehow had to fit in our family budget by repurposing and leveraging our own labour sources... (US ... hahah).

Why, why are we doing this?

Something Cavell and I share in common is the love for making people feel loved and seen.

A talk is not just a talk; it is an experience.

A moment together 5 minutes or 50 minutes, is treasured.

So when we decided we were going to create a space to create memories, the fine details became even more important.

What we want is for people to walk onto this property and feel like they can breathe.

Photoshoots make people stiff, even the good ones. You're posed, you're aware of the camera, you're trying to look like you're not trying. So this weekend, in between all the weeding, we built a sweet low swing. WE built it.

It sounds like a small thing. It's not, really.

Our oldest and Cavell spent the better part of an hour measuring rope and hauling the seat up into the tree, while the baby "helped" by drilling into the ground when it was not in use. 😅

(He also helped by tossing wood chips everywhere and trying to eat dirt.)

But that swing is exactly the kind of thing that makes a kid forget there's a camera pointed at them. It gives families something to actually do together instead of just standing in a pretty spot smiling on command.

That's the whole idea behind this place... give people something real to hold onto, make them feel wildly at home, and the beautiful photos happen almost by accident.

By the end of the weekend we were filthy; I somehow smashed my pinky finger inbeteen a rock and a brick wall... (trust me you will hear many stories about me and my mishaps.. be sure of it)... and we were all the kind of tired where you sit down and genuinely don't want to get back up.

But the property looked... different.

Better.

Loved, maybe, is the word.

I looked out the kitchen window and smiled.

WE did this.

I followed Cavell out, one last time in the backyard, and placed my hands in that "look through and see what I see" photo frame position and said...

"Babe, look... just look. It's like a perfect photo."

The clean yet still rustic gardens, the pergola lit with lights twinkling in the evening dusk, the little accents we put as decor, the swing slowly swaying... and the blue barn and forest blurred in the back.

If you're one of our first guests coming through, that swing is for you.

Sit in it. Push your kid on it. Ignore the camera for a second.

That's kind of the whole point.

Gather. Create. Celebrate.

— Melissa (and the whole mucky crew)