For five years, my family and I imagined what we would do with three months off.
We talked about a European vacation. We talked about a cross-country road trip. We pictured the most extravagant adventure we could imagine because, really, when else do you get three months without work?
That opportunity is an extraordinary gift. I’m deeply grateful to Automattic and Matt Mullenweg for giving me the chance to step away from work for a full three months. A normal vacation gives you time to catch your breath. A sabbatical gives you enough time to forget that you were holding it.
As the sabbatical got closer, life started taking shape in ways that didn’t fit our original plan. The huge trip wasn’t going to happen. Instead, we spent much of those three months remodeling our house and getting it ready to sell.
That was a good thing.
I had also imagined using some of the time to experiment with AI, build personal projects, and work through the list of digital ideas I never seem to get to. I didn’t do any of it. I spent as little time on a screen as possible.
I worked on our house. I built furniture. I spent time with my family. We took a short trip to Kansas City, a longer trip to Destin, and little trips to the conservation area here in Ames. I didn’t feel any pressure to capture those moments or turn them into something. I could just experience them.
It was one of the most rewarding parts of the entire sabbatical. I came away feeling recentered and recalibrated.
Home remodeling
Old houses accumulate projects.
There are the large, obvious jobs, but the small ones are what really pile up. A missing piece of trim waits for a free weekend. A window gets propped open with a block because its sash cord broke. One unfinished task sits beside another until they become part of the house.
My wife kept us on task with a project-management system that warmed my heart as a Technical Account Manager: sticky notes. Every task got its own note. When we finished something, we pulled it down and threw it away.
Simple. Visible. Extremely satisfying, although slightly daunting at first.
Two rooms needed new flooring. Our finished third-story attic still had rainbow-colored shag carpet. My 14-year-old son started pulling it out and just kept going. I didn’t have to give him much direction; he saw what needed to happen and got it done.
Removing the carpet exposed another problem. The stairs leading to the attic had barely any support. I disassembled the treads, saved them as patterns, cut replacements, and reinforced the structure underneath. I’ve done plenty of woodworking and construction projects, but I had never rebuilt stairs like that.
It was a fun challenge, once I got past the part where the stairs were in pieces.
We originally priced new carpet and professional installation for another room. Once we worked through the cost, we changed the plan. We painted the attic floor, found a great deal on carpet for the other room, and I taught myself how to install it.
That pattern repeated throughout the house. I would find something I had never done, spend time with my friend YouTube, learn from people who knew what they were doing, and try it.
The windows were my favorite example. Our house is more than 100 years old, and several of its double-hung windows still use the original weight-and-pulley system. Every sash cord had broken in one room. The windows only stayed open if we propped them up with a block.
This Old House showed me how to find the access points, reach the weights, replace the cords, and put the system back together. While I had the windows out, I replaced the glazing too.
We could have replaced the windows. That would have cost much more, taken longer, and removed some of the character that makes the house special. Restoring them made the windows work again while preserving something original.
It felt a lot like working on an old website. Wiping everything clean and starting over isn’t always the best answer. Sometimes the more interesting question is, How can we improve what’s already here?
We took the same approach outside. My wife designed an entirely new landscaping area to improve the curb appeal, and I installed it. People have asked us who we hired. We get to tell them we did it ourselves.
That’s the feeling I kept coming back to. In the middle of a project, you see the mess, the problems, and everything still left to do. Then you finish. You step back. You realize you learned something new, and the thing in front of you exists because you made it.
The large projects mattered, but so did the fresh paint, touched-up walls, repaired windows, and pieces of trim I had neglected for years. One sticky note at a time, it all became a magnificent home.
And, yes, the house is now listed. If you’re looking to move to Ames, I know a great place.
Woodworking
Woodworking has always been one of my favorite creative escapes. Most of my days are spent helping people build things on screens. Working with wood gives me something physical to shape, assemble, revise, and finish.
Most of my previous furniture projects used inexpensive pine and leaned toward farmhouse or rustic styles. I had been collecting walnut for years, waiting for the right project and enough time to do something special with it.
My daughter’s first apartment gave me both.
She needed something in her room that could hold her television and books. I built a bookshelf with a walnut frame and lighter ash shelves. The contrast between the wood tones pushed the design toward a mid-century modern style I hadn’t attempted before.
My daughter and her roommates loved it. Their apartment didn’t have much kitchen storage, so the next request arrived quickly: could I build them a coffee bar?
The solid-walnut coffee bar is probably the best piece of furniture I’ve ever made.
I didn’t begin with a detailed plan. I knew the dimensions because it had to fit a specific place in the apartment, but most of the design emerged as I built it. I would make progress, show it to my wife and daughters, and ask, “How does this look? What do you think now?”
My wife remembered a piece of caning material my father-in-law had found at an Iowa State University surplus sale and saved for years. She suggested working it into the design. We eventually used it across the back and sides, where it added texture and made the piece feel unlike anything else I had built.
I know how to use traditional joinery such as mortise and tenon, but this piece blended fine furniture with a little speed. I used pocket holes and a Kreg jig. The construction method was practical; the walnut, proportions, and evolving design still made it feel special.
Now it’s the piece in my daughter’s apartment that gets the most compliments. Her friends take pictures and save them as inspiration for their own future homes.
Back at our house, I used more of the walnut to build a coffee table for the living room. We had bought two new couches and wanted to stage the space in front of the fireplace for listing photos.
The first version wasn’t right.
I had assembled the base and top, but the shape still felt too farmhouse and not enough mid-century modern. I took the base apart, recut the legs, and built it again. The second version was simpler, sleeker, and much closer to what I had imagined.
Some of the woodworking was less refined and much more functional. My daughter and her roommates had a large empty closet near their kitchen and laundry area, but no pantry storage. My son and I ripped and cut a mountain of 2x4s and 2x6s and turned the space into useful shelving.
That project gave my wife and me an idea. We were packing much of our house for the sale and debating whether to rent off-site storage. Instead, we used the space we already had and built a shelving system in our basement.
These projects solved real problems. They created storage. They helped us prepare the house. They gave my daughter furniture for her first apartment. They also gave me the time to work with better materials, try a different visual style, listen to feedback, and rebuild something when the first version didn’t work.
That is a pretty good definition of craft.
Destin, FL
We don’t usually travel somewhere hot in August. We prefer the fall, when the temperature drops and the crowds start to thin. The sabbatical gave us a particular window, though, and we had wanted to visit Florida for a long time.
Destin was a somewhat spur-of-the-moment decision. We found an Airbnb at Sandpiper Cove Resort with access to its private beach, chairs and umbrellas, and a beach pavilion restaurant called The Sand Flea. Sitting there with food and drinks while looking over the Gulf was incredible. The water really does earn this part of Florida the name Emerald Coast.
The best part of the trip was that we didn’t make a plan.
We didn’t fill a calendar with activities or give ourselves somewhere to be every morning. We woke up and decided what sounded good that day. Most days, that meant enjoying the beach, the waves, and the water.
It was hot and humid, but the water offered a reprieve. We watched stingrays move through the shallows. We saw dolphins, a manatee, and spotted manta rays near the shore twice. The wildlife made an unplanned beach day feel like its own adventure1.
My favorite day came when we drove west to Navarre Beach. We had hoped to snorkel at the artificial reef, but the waves and weather were too rough. So we walked the Navarre Beach Fishing Pier instead.
The pier stretches 1,545 feet into the Gulf and stands 30 feet above the water. We watched sea turtles surface again and again. We saw dolphins, schools of fish, and people pulling their catches up from the water below.
The snorkeling trip we planned didn’t happen. The day we had instead became my favorite.
That feels right for this sabbatical.
Coming back
Just before my sabbatical, I had the extraordinary opportunity to join the AI enablement cohort in New York. One week after I returned, I joined our team meetup in Canada.
The timing was perfect. After three months grounded in physical work, family, friends, and community, I came back to rooms full of people collaborating, learning, and enjoying one another’s company.
It reinforced something I have believed for a long time: the work is about people and connections.
We build software and websites, but the value comes from what those things allow people to do. They help someone share an idea, find a community, run a business, teach something, ask for help, or reach another person. On the Special Projects team, we get to create those opportunities directly through websites and through the ways we help other teams.
AI makes this moment more complicated and more interesting. It is quickly becoming a default source of ideas, answers, and assistance. I spent almost none of my sabbatical using it, then returned directly into conversations about how we can use it throughout our work.
I don’t see those experiences as contradictory. The best uses of AI can give us more room to be human. A tool that takes notes lets me stay present in the conversation. A tool that handles repetitive work gives me more time to listen, collaborate, and help someone directly.
The best ideas still grow between people. So do the moments that matter.
I want to carry that back into my work by being more present on calls, making more room for one-on-one conversations, supporting local meetups, and finding new ways to use WordPress to connect people.
That’s my passion going forward: using WordPress to connect people.
What helps you step away, recenter, and remember the people behind your work?
- We didn’t get a super clear view, but we were called out of the water by lifeguards one day for sharks. You could easily make out the shapes in the water, but I couldn’t capture anything on camera. ↩︎
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