Virtual Staycation – Return From Hiatus
Time flies, they say. Our month-long virtual staycation has flown by. We return from hiatus just in time for a featured spot on BoardingArea next week.
Why a Hiatus?
We decided midway through last month to take a little break – a virtual staycation, if you will. This was a rare occurrence given our business and personal calendars. Beyond one overnight trip, I had an extended stretch of time with NO travel commitments at all! We would actually have the opportunity to experience how non-road warrior families live. Every morning, we could get up a normal time. We could eat dinner together every evening. Normal activities with friends and family could be planned without much calendar synchronization.
We decided to cut down our overall screen time for the month. Part of our virtual staycation was putting Jetsetters Homestead on hiatus to focus on a few big-ticket projects. We had no specific return from hiatus in our sight, other than we knew we’d be coming back featured on BoardingArea on August 22.
What Were We Up To?
One big item was kicking off a major remodeling project with our architect (the amazingly talented Marta Rozanich from konstrukcio studio). She is going to execute our vision of finishing the redesign of the 1924 craftsman bungalow I’ve lived in for 10 years. This last major project will conclude all of the work I’ve put into rehabilitating this once-eyesore. The last overhaul will include reconfiguring the master suite, scraping the structurally unsound dirt floor garage, adding on a casita, converting the carport to a porte-cochère, and giving the covered front porch a minor facelift.
To get ready for this project, we’ve been working room-by-room to weed through clutter. Part of this is practical – we will need to vacate the master suite during the remodel. Space will be at a premium so getting rid of junk is important. Part of this is financial – we will be refinancing for the remodel so having a tidy fresh home
The decluttering has been both fun and frustrating. Jim already went through this process before he moved to Curaçao so he has been a good cheerleader. When he moved back here he came with only a couple of suitcases and a few stored boxes. I’ve not had time to declutter in recent years so some of my “collections” have been quite interesting. 300 compact discs, 200 DVDs, all my receipts and tax records dating back to 2000 are just a few of the archives I’ve unearthed. Just today I pulled out a neatly filed set of travel articles, organized by country, carefully culled from dozens of travel magazines. The only problem? They were two decades old!
We have also begun some of our redecorating. While the major work will occur during/after the remodel, we have been working through some of the color palette changes now as we start pulling new items. We bought our new bed in April (a Sleep Number i8) and picked out bed linens
What’s Next?
Our virtual staycation gave us a great opportunity to stop writing and start thinking. We had the opportunity to talk a lot about what we enjoy writing about (and what we don’t). And we took a deeper look at what content people were interacting with, particularly on social media (Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter). We realized we have a definite disconnect between our engagement there (more “homestead”) and our content here (more “jetsetter”) which we are going to address.
As we return from hiatus, we want to spend more time connecting those dots. We know we are not the only business travelers that are living with a foot planted firmly in both worlds. Our focus will be on trying to share more about how we manage our lifestyle – organization tips, fast and easy fixes, and fresh ideas. But we’ll still also share our favorite travel stories, hacks, and tricks for navigating the day-to-day grind. Check back with us next week for a bit of both worlds as we catch up on a couple of our virtual staycation projects as well as some hiatus travel news.
Great to see you both back. I’ve missed the blog posts.