Hey Happy New Year! Thank goodness it’s off to such a boring start that promises a happy, drama-free year, right?! Heh. I’m kidding.

But here in our house, things are indeed off to a boring and drama free start. We’ve just kind of been sitting around playing video games and reading and doing puzzles, in fact, and having a hard time snapping out of winter break mode. The fact that no one’s really going anywhere and everyone’s wearing pajamas all the time isn’t helping much (even Dave is home all the time so far, as his school is online at least this week because SO MUCH COVID. We don’t see him much because he’s holed up in our room teaching online, but when we do see him he’s generally wearing pajamas).

So I thought to myself, what better way to shake this lethargy than by making a big, exhausting-sounding list of house projects we’d like to get done this year?! So I’ll do that. After I talk about Christmas a little.

Christmas was nice. And quiet. It was pretty much just us, but my mom and stepdad stopped by for a little while, since Dave hadn’t been in a covid-y classroom for more than two weeks at that point. Here’s my most 2020 Christmas picture:

I took a ton of pictures! I won’t spew them all here. But I finally got some nice ones of the kids with the tree for like the first time ever. It turns out the key is to use the tree in the room with the good light. Who knew?

I thought Christmas might drag by, what with nowhere to go and nothing to do. But it turned out to be really nice to have such a Christmas. Not that I want to repeat it next year. But once was good.

Onward!

Oh, I guess first I should do the part where I look back at what we’ve gotten done over the past year. There was some boring stuff like new windows (which actually was on my list of goals for 2020) that never made the blog, because boring.

But our biggest house thing was installing bamboo floors in Ari and Abe’s rooms:

Ari’s room got painted, too, and we made him a desk, but I haven’t gotten around to blogging about that yet. Or to finishing his room.

We did some stuff with the library, too, like bought this thrifted table and those chairs from Ikea and then an awesome rug from Rifle Paper, Co. We didn’t get the rug until after the tree was up, so I only have Christmassy pictures of it so far:

And then we kept busy with very cliched pandemic projects, namely chickens! (and a brooder set up we were very happy with for a change) and a surprisingly semi-successful garden. This reminds me that I started but didn’t finish a blog post with grown-up chicken pictures. Christmas came along and crowded them out. Sorry, chickens–I’ll get back to you!

Oh! We also worked on the porch some, but that’s ANOTHER thing I haven’t blogged about yet. But it needs more work first is why.

So how about 2021? I don’t know–making plans seems very silly at the moment, doesn’t it? But here are a few things we’d like to maybe do.

Finish Ari’s room: you know, so he can move out of it again and go back to college. But then it will be Milo’s room while he’s gone. I need to find him a new dresser and probably build him a bed. Some place for books. And then cover the walls with fun stuff, which is already in progress.

More bamboo! I’d love to do the floors in our room and our giant closet this year. It’s sort of an intimidating job, as much because we have to move all the furniture out as anything else. We should probably coordinate it with getting a new mattress, which is another thing that should definitely happen this year!

Outside spaces: it’d be nice to keep spending a lot of time outside even when we don’t have to anymore, and making our outside spaces more inviting would help with that. I have the beginnings of a vision that involves a lot of flagstone (for the chickens to poop on).

Upstairs hallway: Dare I put one more? This one makes the list pretty much every year, and we never get to it, so why not? I’d like to do a simple upstairs hallway makeover: paint, new light fixtures, some shelving…it won’t take that much effort, so why can’t we get it done?!

This post was actually more about other things than this year’s plans, it turns out. But that’s because making plans is for suckers! Anyway, we’ll see what happens.