2018 Holiday Staycation

The holidays are over and we’re back to work, so let’s reflect on what we did over vacation. Usually we spend a couple days out of the house – we stay in a hotel somewhere and do things – but this year we decided to stay home. We are still exhausted from all of the renovations this summer and wanted to take it easy.

House Work

We also needed to finish up some things around the house that have been lingering since the kitchen. I finally finished painting all of the trim in the dining room so it matches the cleanliness of the kitchen and living room. We’ve got six walls, six windows, and two doors worth of trim in there so it has taken a long time to paint. I had already spent several hours sealing knot stains in the trim and putting a first coat on part of the room but needed another two afternoons (and several hours of documentaries about Nazis) to finish everything off with 2 – 3 coats. Now that it is all done, the room (or at least the trim) looks shiny and new.

In addition to the dining room there was work to do in the basement addition. We had an issue with our dryer ventilation that wasn’t addressed to our liking by our contractors so I decided to take it into my own hands. It took about 2 hours of problem solving, two trips to Home Depot, and two hours of work to fix the issue. Now our basement addition won’t get soaked and grow mold when we dry clothes. I also put support rods between the joists in the ceiling so the insulation won’t fall out.

Sally did a crap-ton of organization around the house. She re-organized and thinned out our Christmas stuff so that we could actually move in the basement and consolidated and cleaned up our pantry area in the basement so that we could find stuff. She organized our hallway closet upstairs that has all of our extra bathroom items in it as well. She also cleaned up the boys’ clothing in prep for the next year.

The surface of the drywall above our upstairs shower has been slowly peeling up for years so I finally cut it out and spackled over it. I’m almost done repainting the patched areas. Once that’s done, Sally will paint the ceiling of both bathrooms. There is still quite a bit of cosmetic work to do in the house afterwards (paint downstairs hallway trim, patch / repaint upstairs hallway / repaint the office) but we’ve made a good dent in it and our most frequently-used rooms look a bit more fresh.

Fun Work

We made sure to get out of the house a few times throughout our time off so we didn’t go crazy. We took the boys bowling and to the arcade one afternoon which was fun. We all really enjoy going to the arcade for a couple hours at a time and the boys have recently started enjoying bowling so it was a fun time. We also had our annual Christmas Eve breakfast with the Roberge family which is a nice way to relax and catch up. We topped off the time off by seeing Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse, which we all enjoyed.

I did have a chance to play some of the games on my holiday game list, though I switched things up a bit. I scoured Egypt in Assassin’s Creed Origins, raised dinosaurs in Jurassic World: Evolution, and destroyed futuristic Nazis in The New Colossus. I played Far Cry 5 a tiny bit but became bored quickly; I never made a visit to colonial New England in Assassin’s Creed III. I played one of the single player maps in Battlefield V, which I received for free with my GTX 2070.

All in all a pretty balanced holiday. I didn’t sit around all day and Sally didn’t go too crazy being home all week. Next up: MLK weekend!