It’s a crazy time.

We’ve been practicing social distancing and washing our hands and organizing our shelf-stable foods while the coronavirus pandemic is sweeping through Georgia.

I had to cancel a big event for work, and for our nonprofit, that’s a potentially huge impact on our ability to deliver services. But we’ve been working to keep our focus where it needs to be, and we’re finding ways to move on and keep getting our programs into the community. Needless to say, when I finally came up for air, I needed to think about something I could control.

Last weekend (with final touches by my gorgeous spouse this week), we painted our front door. Call it what you will, but with the weight of worry that was upon me — thinking about how my parents will navigate this crisis, thinking about how to unify our nonprofit community, thinking about remote staff management, and all of the many thinks that had my brain waking me up at all hours — knowing that my front door was cute kinda got me through. I bought a Yeti to match. It’s a whole thing.

But on to today’s project…

We have struggled, since buying our first home last year, to figure out how to prioritize our big projects, financially, and with DIY time. When we talk about the fence we need for Ellie ?, somehow I always bring it back around to how much I hate the lumpy oatmeal carpet on the stairs, and we tend to find ourselves overwhelmed. This conversation generally ends with Indigo reminding me that we can’t afford to do everything at one time, and we probably need to talk about our priorities (which is a very normal thing to say to your wife and not at all an attack on my moral character) yet this usually results in me huffing about an attack on my moral character.

Obviously, we needed a timeline to help us. I looked all over for a good timeline template that didn’t make me manually adjust dates or learn about Gantt charts (no, thank you, Saturdays are for fun). Finally, I gave up and made my own.

One of the many lessons we learned while planning our wedding in 2018 was that while I am able to read spreadsheets as if they are narrative, my spouse just can’t. All of those blank cells, formulas, and rows and columns of text make it hard to differentiate information, or prioritize and rank what’s there. It can be overwhelming to someone who doesn’t easily read that way. (Fun fact: this situation is reversed with Twitter. Indigo can read Twitter like it’s news, and I get lost and somehow always end up sad.)

Our household budget, holiday card list, and basically every spreadsheet we share and work from are all colorful and bright, with the extra rows hidden and rainbows shining out from the screen. Today, I reworked one of our spreadsheets into a project timeline, so we can plot out our house projects for the rest of the year.

Each month has its own space, so we can plot big and small projects in a way that isn’t overwhelming, and since we’ve learned to be realistic about how much we can/will do in a year, there are project planning spaces for 2021 and 2022 as well. For each project row, we have a space for estimated costs and time frames, dates, and notes.

Then, I remembered that our to-plan projects are all in a jumble in our minds, so I added project lists to the right, sorted into big projects, small projects, and things we want to learn. The columns align so that we can copy and paste the project name, cost, and estimated time for completion from our planning area, right into our timeline on the left.

Plus, it’s pretty. ?

But never let it be said that we aren’t happy to share! I have created a template file so that you, too, can enjoy the sweet, sweet feeling of planning your DIYs and Pay-Somebodies for your home or project. Without the marital strife. And with rainbows.