Harold's Renovation Blog: #78: How We (Mostly) Pulled Off A Merry Yet Minimal Christmas

Christmas often flies in the face of our efforts to cut down on clutter and simplify the stuff in our house, so this year we employed four tactics to minimize all the excess without sacrificing the merriment of Christmas morning. And it worked! Well, mostly (there was one memorable fail). We also both take wildly different approaches to New Year’s resolutions so we’re sharing a few things we’re resolving to do in 2018. Plus, our big duplex renovation has already hit a snag before we could even start, and why a bunch of naked people on TV are inspiring us to look at our possessions in a whole new way.

You can download this episode from Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn Radio, and now Spotify – or listen to it below! Then use this page to check out any links, notes, or photos we referenced. Note: If you’re reading in a feed reader, you might have to click through to the post to see the player.

What’s New

You can hear our original discussion of the duplex, the changes we want to make to its roofline, and the process we have to go through for approval by the town’s historic review board in Episode #76
Below is what it currently looks like, followed immediately by a couple of the inspiration pictures featuring dormer windows in the roof that helped push us towards that feature when we rebuild the roof (it also helps that a few historic houses in town have that exact roofline so we know it’ll fit right in).

first pic source | second pic source

And you can hear about how minimalism snuck into our Christmas last year in Episode #30 and how the book Simplicity Parenting inspired us to keep a better handle on our kids’ toys in Episode #45 (embedded below):

And below is a photo we shared on Instagram last week from Christmas morning. Some of you asked about the some of the items pictured, so here’s the 20″ bike and smaller balance bike shown (both of them were the “big” grandparent gifts) as well as the pretty set of books we got our daughter.
Also, here’s the Coji coding robot that Santa delivered to our girl (it has been a big hit!) – just don’t get the one our son got. It’s a nightmare.

What’s Not Quiz

Here’s where you can read the Pinterest 100 trends for 2018 (including “patterned plants” – like the prayer plant shown below).
And here’s the image Pinterest linked to the “rug stencil” example back on their 2015 list.

image source

Resolutions

You can check out Episode #30 below to hear the compilation of “house resolutions” you left on our voicemail last year, as well as some of our own resolutions from 2017. The whole conversation starts around the 13:15 mark.

We’re Digging

Here’s where you can learn more about Stripped on Bravo, the show that is a surprisingly fascinating social experiment. I’ll link to one of the Stripped promos so you can see it for yourself. Everything’s blurred, but it’s still too NSFW to embed here – ha!
And here’s that game What Do You Meme? that we had tons of (grown-up) fun playing with some friends over the holiday. If you’re a Cards Against Humanity fan, we highly recommend it! Below is one of the card combos that had us cracking up.

If you’re looking for something we’ve dug in a past episode, but don’t remember which show notes to click into, here’s a master list of everything we’ve been digging from all of our past episodes.

And lastly, a big thank you to You Need A Budget (YNAB) for sponsoring this episode. Sign up at YNAB.com/YHL to get your first three months free!