It was a very close race, but we’re extremely excited, honored, and oh so appreciative to be announced as the winners of the JDR Annual Industry Blogger Awards in the Remodeling category! That deserves a few more exclamation points… !!!!!!!! Thank you all so much for your votes, Tweets, and Facebook posts. We seriously couldn’t have done it without you.

As we mentioned last week, the winner gets a $500 cash prize. In the sprit of paying it forward, a portion of the winnings will be going to Rebuilding Together Richmond – an affiliate of the national Rebuilding Together organization (you may have seen their Raise a Roof campaign on HGTV). Rebuilding Together is the nation’s leading nonprofit working to preserve affordable homeownership and revitalize communities. It’s a volunteer-based program that repairs and rehabilitates non-profit community buildings and homes throughout the community. Read more about Rebuilding Together here. Find a Rebuilding Together affiliate in your area here.

A special thank you to Jackson Design & Remodeling for putting together such a great contest. They have been great to work with throughout this process (thanks Jenny!). Be sure to click over and check out the winners in the other categories: 2Modern (architecture), Freshome (interior design), Building Blox (construction business), and BuildDirect Green Blog (green). We’re so excited to be in such great company!

Again, thank you all so much for your support! We’ve said it before, but we’ll say it again… over the past 19 months, this blog has become like a part of the family. We’ve enjoyed every minute of it and are looking forward for things to come.

Last year, we were stunned, excited and over the moon when we found out we won the 2011 Industry Blogger Awards (in the Remodeling category) hosted by Jackson Design & Remodeling. This year, we’re even more stunned, excited and over the moon because we were nominated again!

We’ve mentioned it here and there over the past month, but now we’re down to the last 24 hours of voting and we would love love love your vote. Right now, we’re in a close(ish) second place and it looks like it’s going to be a tight race to the finish line.

Voting is super easy – it literally takes 5.8 seconds to vote. Yes, we actually timed it. To cast your vote, all you need to do is click here, select “7th House on the Left”, and click “Vote”. Bada bing bada boom! The winner in each category will receive a $500 cash prize and a fancy shmancy award to display. Like last year, if we are lucky enough to win, a portion of the winnings will go to Rebuilding Together Richmond. Also, be sure to check out the other blogs that have been nominated. There are really great blogs and you are bound to find a few new favorites to add to your RSS reader.

Thank  you for your support and rocking the vote! By the way, your hair looks awesome today. And have you lost weight? ; )

UPDATE 4/13: The polls are now closed and the winner will be officially announced next week! Thank you all so so so much for your support.

For those of you reading in Google Reader, click on over to check out the new look! We’ve been working on this for about five months (yes, it actually takes that long to do things like this) and we’re so happy, and releaved, to finally reveal the new and improved 7th House on the Left.

There are a few more tweaks we are working on, but rather than waiting, we wanted to go ahead, bite the bullet and unleash the new and improved look. We didn’t want to do a total transformation – we really like the notebook design and it says a lot about how we do things (project notebooks are our jam). What the blog really needed was a little bit of tightening and brightening. We (mostly Greg) worked on making the nuts and bolts more efficient and making the overall style of the blog mirror our personal style a little better.

We’ve made a bunch of changes, big and small. From the about page to the full disclaimer + privacy policy page, everyting has been revamped. The biggest difference between the new design and the old one is the color scheme. When we put together the first design, we hadn’t even put the first drop of paint on the walls. If you look back at the post about our first apartment, you’ll notice the color scheme was a lot like the first blog design – or “7th House 1.0″ as Greg calls it. That’s probably because we were living there when we designed it…

Now that we’re actually living in the house and the walls have been painted for a good long time, we noticed the old design 7th House 1.0 looked nothing like our house – which kind of defeats the purpose, right? In fact, remember when I stumbled on a color scheme for the living room? Yeah, the stack of books. Well, when deciding on 7th House 2.0′s color scheme, we decided that would be a good jump off point for the blog too…

See the similarities?

There are a lot of new changes in every nook of the blog but one of my very favorite additions is the Pinterest widget in the sidebar. As you’ve probably figured out by now, I’m a total Pinterest junkie. When we were brainstorming for 7th House 2.0, I mentioned to Greg that it would be so awesome if there was a way to share my latest pins automatically, and be able to click on the photo and go to that pin. He just kind of looked at me with a really weird look on his face and said, “Give me twenty minutes”. Twenty minutes later, low and behold, he created my dream sidebar feature. Sorry ladies, he’s taken.

We’re still ironing out a few kinks, so thanks in advance for being patient and feel free to let us know if something looks wonky on your computer (just let us know what browser/version you’re using). Every computer is different – that’s the crux of designing a blog from scratch. Take a minute and look around the new digs and let us know what you think!

Psssst… We’re not finished yet, but a full kitchen update is coming your way soon!