Cheers to 2021! What a helluva ride this past year was. In a run-on sentence, we dealt with a boiler and hot water heater that were both on the fritz, adopted a new dog, trained an FFA team, quarantined, taught remotely for four months, spent days cleaning up a tree that came down in a storm (which we wanted to keep), planted a rock star garden, bought a camper, went camping, both started new (ish) jobs, read a lot of books, hosted not one but two Great American Shit Sales™, watered a ton of house plants, almost finished our office, almost finished our dining room, started a woodworking business, actually finished our living room, and our highlight – we bought a hot tub.

We’re three days into 2021 and we’ve spent the past few days focusing on how we can better our blog and our house projects. We’ve said it before, but we’ve really sucked at blogging (which wasn’t our intention). We purchased our friend Andrea Kerbuski’s The Blog Essentials course this summer, and even though we still haven’t touched it (sorry, Andrea. It’s been a busy year!), we’re planning on completing it this month. We’re hoping the course will help us really kick off the blog and get it to where we want it to be.

And here our 2021 goals for The Beck Street House:

Blog More!

We’ve really sucked at blogging, but here we go again! In 2021, we want to blog more. Yep, we bet you’d never hear us say that again. Even though it’s definitely not as hot as it use to be, we actually really enjoy blogging. The thing is, we don’t do it enough – or think about doing it as we’re tackling projects. For example, our office is about 95% done and we could have published a million posts about, but are there posts about our office on here? Not a damn one.

Our “Blog More!” goal for 2021 is twofold. Our goal is to publish a blog post about once a week (sometimes more, sometimes less depending on work and life), but also to be more intentional about them as well. Usually, it’s a “well shit, it’s been a while since we’ve posted, so let’s write a blog post about…bagels!” (We’ve done this before), which isn’t really the vibe we’re going for. Instead, we want to be more systematic and more thoughtful about our posts, and have a plan ahead of time before posting.

Finish our Projects

Guilty. We are (okay, Alan is) awful at finishing projects. Our dining room is almost done, but for a good six months, it sat looking like this, complete with un-sanded nail holes and thrift store furniture (Well, sorta. This table’s now our interim desk in our office.)

And as we type this, we still have a downstairs bathroom that has yet to be finished, along with a million other projects that need finishing touches so we can cross them off the list. Laryssa? A rockstar. 10/10 at getting house projects done in a timely manner. Hell, she deserves a 12/10 for touching up and caulking the living room trim that’s sat for 12+ months. Alan? -6.

Bring The Blog up to Speed

We’re guilty on this one too. We’ve made a ton of upgrades to our house, and, well, maybe 25% of them have actually made it onto the blog. We’re struggling on how to bridge what the house use to look like and where she is now. But seriously, we’ve made really good progress on a number of rooms, including our office and dining room, and we’re excited to share them with you and get the blog back on track!

De-Duck The Rest House

Yep, we still have rooms in the house that are still sporting some duck wallpaper (lookin’ at you, master bedroom and bathroom.) We could also title this goal ‘actually work on the upstairs,’ (which we’ve yet to touch.) By the end of 2021, we’d like to say that our house is free of all hunting/fishing/duck wallpaper that use to line this house from floor to ceiling.

So now that we’ve talked about our actual goals for 2021, let’s talk a little bit about the projects we want to cross off the list between now and December 31. Here’s a not so complete list with some additional commentary.

• Finish the last few details in our office and dining room. They’re both almost there!
• Redo our main but not-so-main entry way, which no one really uses.
• Finish our downstairs bathroom. Yikes. Remember when we said it would be done in a week?
• Address our pantry, which still has an upright piano in there. Anyone interested? Or need some stress relief?
• Redo “Amy’s room.” We’re still struggling with what to name this room for right now. Laundry room? Craft room? Storage pit? Anyway, we’ve got big plans for this small room and….hopefully we finish it.
• Continue to work on our landscaping, and remove some trees.
• Work on our backyard area. We have a beautiful backyard, but we have a ton of trees that have fallen that we need to take care of.
• Redo our master bedroom and bathroom. Laryssa says “gut it!” And I’m like, “let’s make small, tangible changes to get us through!” Either way, we have duck wallpaper, wood paneling, and retail store carpet up there that needs to go.
• Update our guest bedroom so guests will actually want to stay in it.

Oh, and we’re also hoping to camp a lot more this year, too.

We can’t wait to keep you posted and show you the things we cross off our list in 2021! What’s on your list?

A+L