Countertops,Tile, Soap, and Life Today

I've been holding out on you. It may seem by the looks of my posts lately, that I'm not up to much. That is FAR from the truth though.

This holiday season I decided to branch out a little and participated in a Holiday Bazaar that was NOT affiliated with my day job. Dec 6 found me at the Madeleine Marketplace held at the Madeleine church in Portland. I'm so glad I did this bazaar! I met some great people, sold a lot of awesome soap, and even picked up a new contract for soap! Needless to say, next year I'm going to try and participate in a few more holiday bazaars.

Since then, I have been back to frantically replenishing my soap stock. I've made more Peppermint Ice, Cinnamon&Honey, Lavender Meringue, and Activated Charcoal soap in the past few weeks.

Speaking of the Activated Charcoal Goats' Milk soap, I've changed the mold and am now using the cube mold.

It looks so sophisticated and it's still packed with the same wonderful ingredients and scented with lemongrass and basil essential oils!

If you follow me on Instagram (click here if you don't), you may have noticed that I finally got the 'Shopping' feature working on my posts! Now when you see a photo of my soap, you can click the tag on the image and be directed to my website to order! I'm so glad to finally add this functionality to my business.

On another soap related note, I will need to raise my prices come the new year. I try very hard to keep my prices to a minimum and in the almost 10 years I've run my little soap business I've never raised the prices. Unfortunately, what with the cost of supplies going up and using inferior ingredients not an option, that's got to change.

So come January all soap bars go up in price by $1. Good news though, I will add a permanent special so you can order 5 bars for $25 which will bring the price back down to $5 a bar! I will also continue to offer Free Shipping on orders over $35. I will make this change to the website sometime in January when I have time, so get your orders in fast before the price goes up!

I know I've blogged a lot about my kitchen projects over the years (here, here, and here), but I've got another update!

I've been wanting a tile backsplash for ages but felt restricted by the way the counter tops went up the wall a few inches (see photo). Since the counter tops were over 15 years old and I am no longer crazy about the red color, I saved my money and got new counter tops!





I went with a Quartz in Cortina. Here's a small image.


Once the counter tops were installed, Jeff and I tiled the backsplash! I used Cloe wall tile from Bedrosians. Here's an image:

We installed the tile ourselves and this was the first tile job I've ever done. I'm so pleased with how it turned out!

There are a gazillion websites and videos (I watched most of them!) that show you how to DIY your own tile backsplash so I'm not going to pretend I'm an expert now and write about it.

Instead, I know you're waiting for the before and after pictures and here you go:

BEFORE (not bad...)

And After (with the new stove):

After

Love the new sink!

I even added counter tops to the hutch.

Before

After

As you can see, things have been busy around here!

I hope your 2018 was an enlightening year full of personal growth and compassion!

Here's to 2019 and all it has in store!

Catching Up

Yep, it's been a little quiet over here the past month. Rest a sure that's not because things aren't happening, they are. It's more that things aren't getting completed.

You see, I've been busy designing my new website! I'm real excited about it, please check it out! There are bigger photos and I added 5-star reviews to it in hopes people will leave reviews to help future customers.

"Are you dissing me?!"

With the launch of the new website, I will be taking more (and better, always better) photos of my soap. I just haven't yet. Part (ok, most) of that's due to the fact that Harlan, the grey parrot, now lives in what was my photo studio.

I've even made a new soap using a new mold! It's Orange Poppy Seed and it's shaped like a cube! It's still curing but it smells delicious and I love the look of the new cube shape so much I think I'll use it for the Activated Charcoal soap next time I make it. Wouldn't that look divine? A big block of black soap?

Anyway, my new website's official launch is waiting on Google. Of course Google doesn't know that, I'm sure they have bigger issues than adding something in their software so the new, redesigned Lora's Beauty website can go live using the same url of www.lorasbeauty.com.

It's all a little convoluted and more that you probably want to know, but the jest of it is, Lora's Beauty websites (old and new) are built using Google Sites technology, a free website building software that's been around for years (10 years? Longer?) Just this past month I noticed that a new version of this software was out, conveniently called New Google Sites. I immediately started playing around with it and loved it so much, I rebuilt my entire website!

Now, here's where the problem comes in. I have purchased the domain name of lorasbeauty.com and have it pointed to my Old Google site via a CName change at my domain name registrar (stick with me here). This means that every time you type www.lorasbeauty.com or even just lorasbeauty.com into a web browser, you are directed to my Old Google site. This is done because the actual url of the site is this: https://sites.google.com/site/lorasbeauty/. This doesn't roll of the tongue quite as well as lorasbeauty.com. For example, take this imaginary conversation:

~imaginary conversation~
Random Person: "Do you have a website where I can reorder this awesome soap?"
Me: "Sure, go to https, colon, forward slash, forward slash, sites dot google dot com, forward slash, site, forward slash, lorasbeauty".
~ end of imaginary conversation

See what I mean?

No problem, you're probably thinking, just change that CName record to point to your New Google site. Well, Google hasn't implemented that yet for people using the free version. Sure, I could pay Google some money every month and then I could do it but, well, free is better and Google says it's coming for the free version.... So I wait.

In the meantime, I have done a redirect so that if you type new.lorasbeauty.com in the url bar, you'll be directed to my new website.

Take a look, let me know what you think in the comments below, and if you've used Lora's Beauty soap before, please leave a review (from any of the product pages)! If you haven't used Lora's Beauty soap before (or if you just want to reorder) you can order all the skin loving and scrumptious smelling soap from the new site while you're checking it out! The old site works also.

"Did someone say PARTY!?"

When all this technical stuff gets worked out and www.lorasbeauty.com points to the NEW website I'll be sure to let you know! We'll have a party! Maybe even a sale????!!!

Grab Your Mobile Devices We're Having A Celebration SALE!

According to the latest statistics, people are accessing the internet by mobile devices over 70% of the time. Having a website that doesn't look perfect on a mobile device today means you could be missing a lot of sales!

Do me a favor, pick up your phone (if you're not on it already) and go to www.lorasbeauty.com. This week I worked on bringing the Lora's Beauty website into the mobile world! You could always access it via a mobile device however it wasn't pretty. You might have needed to scroll or zoom in. That is all fixed now though!

Not only that, I tested it using Google's Test My Site application. It should load under 5 seconds if connected via a 3G connection. Those areas with faster networks should load quicker.

I know, this is all pretty geeky-boring stuff, but it was on my to-do list for a couple years so I'm thrilled to have it done and working so nicely. In fact, I'm so thrilled of this accomplishment that Lora's Beauty is having a SALE!

Now through Labor Day (September 5) order $25 or more from Lora's Beauty and receive $5 off (discount will be taken automatically)! That's a free bar of fresh-from-the-goat goats' milk soap! We've restocked the store and are ready to celebrate so grab your phone, tablet, or even your laptop and place an order today.

Don't forget, Lora's Beauty offers Free Shipping in the US on orders $30 or more!

What's in a Name?

What's in a name?  I've been asking myself that a lot lately and I finally decided a name is important. Important enough to change when necessary.  Even when that change affects urls, forwarding recipes, CNames, txt record changes, and includes the risk of ruining a good thing.  I said all that to say, Lora's Beauty blog can now be found under the 'simple' url of simply.lorasbeauty.com.  Lora's Beauty online store will remain www.lorasbeauty.com; no change there.

You can still access the blog from the old url lorasbeauty.blogspot.com, you'll 'simply' (ok, last time I'll do that) be redirected to simply.lorasbeauty.com.  With this change, my hope is to create a more professional, interesting, and insightful area to share not only happenings in the Lora's Beauty Online Store, but also things I find intriguing. They will include, but are not limited to, recipes, links, books, furniture remodels, and photographs.

So, what's in a name, simply (sorry, couldn't resist that one) everything!

simply.lorasbeauty.com