Marketing 101

The newspaper article came out today ("Dawning of a dream / Couple forge ahead on restoration of 1760 mansion," LancasterOnline.com) and I saw my web traffic spike. Then I realized all these new people were reading a morose dissertation on how unhappy I was last week. Sorry about that! I'm feeling much better now.

I have to say, it's one thing when I write something in an online journal, and quite another when it gets reported in the newspaper. A few comments about the article:

• Dawn grew up in Lancaster, moving to Los Angeles after college. (The article makes it sound like she was from California, too.)
• Robert Coleman did live in the mansion, when he was still a clerk for James Old. After Coleman married James' eldest daughter, Ann, he leased Salford Forge and they moved out. Around 1795, Coleman expanded the mansion, but he didn't live there at that time.
• I wasn't "awed" by the size of the farm or the age of the house; I couldn't conceive of it. There's a difference.
• We weren't "stonewalled" by local officials, they just want to hold us to modern building standards, and I can't do everything they ask without either destroying the character of the house, or bankrupting the project. They've actually been pretty reasonable and helpful as we've negotiated compromises. It's just been a time-consuming and costly process.
• And Dawn didn't talk the county engineer out of requiring us to enlarge the driveway; she asked him to come out and look at the traffic patterns, and he decided that a pull-off would work instead of the two-lane access road required by code.

That said, if you're here for the first time, welcome! Check out the "Favorites" on the right, especially the "Video Carnage" and the last video on "Videopalooza" -- those are a lot of fun. (The video on the clawfoot tub is also in Videopalooza, but if you're from OSHA, please don't view it.) I don't recommend you try to read the entire journal -- there's 190 entries from the last two years -- but if you subscribe by email, you'll get an update every couple of days or so. This project is so big, there's always something interesting going on. (Plus you can easily unsubscribe, and I'm not going to give your email address to anyone.)

If you want to sign up for the tour on December 28, . (Hopefully they'll have the heat on again by then.)

Dawn in the center of operations (yes, that's a shower stall)