My House Goals for 2012

Wow! Two posts in one week!? This is UNHEARD OF. But, I have good reason. Following the lead of Centsational Girl (I just recently started following her sweet blog), I wanted to get my house goals for 2012 out there. The husband is not involved in these in any way, so he'd probably add or remove a few, but he's not here right now. So this list is all mine (cue wicked laugh). Maybe this list can hold us accountable to get 'em all done...and if I still feel like blogging by the end of the year we can recap and see how many actually got crossed off. And how about we get all cute and narrow them down to 12? Because let's face it, I could probably have a list of 94,898,349.

Without further ado:

1. Redo the fireplace in the family room, and add flanking built-in bookshelves.

Pre-paint on the walls

2. Paint all the closet doors and get them back in place so I don't have to look at everything in them every time I walk by.

3. Finish the master bedroom wall stencil before stencils go out of style. Oh I never blogged about that? Shocker. Maybe one day.

4. Carpet the dungeon, a.k.a. the new living room/den. Man, we need to just nail down a name for that room already! It's been painted, we're just figuring out where we want to buy the carpet from. I'd love to use a local mom-and-pop shop, but when they're 20 times more expensive than Lowe's that's a hard pill to swallow. We're already investing many pennies into this pad!

5. Renovate the master bathroom. Or for the love of God replace the toilet that never looks clean and uses 14 gallons of water every time it's flushed.

Don't judge my decorating skills—this was before we bought it thankyouverymuch

6. Renovate the kitchen. There, I said it.

Yikes! This is right after we moved in. Looks 7% better now.

7. Paint the exterior wood panelling, front door, garage door and trim. And replace the rotting soffits and add some more vents.

8. Fix up the disaster area that we call an "office". Not even going to show a current picture of the hideousness.

After carpet and curtain removal, before wallpaper and blind removal

9. Get our front yard garden going this spring! Not sure how the neighbors are going to feel about that, but it ain't yo' yard (snaps fingers and bobs head).

That giant pine tree is gone...we're feeling a bit exposed

10. Make the rest of the wallpaper in the house HISTORY!

Also before we moved in. Fun fact: that rug was pretty much
fused to the floor. Thanks Mom for scraping it off!

11. Turn the sun porch into a useable space by painting the walls, cleaning the windows, painting the floor, and getting some furniture.

Not a great shot of the porch, but you can kinda see it. And the
decal that is long gone.

12. Add a French door to the backyard in the dining room. And a patio for back there while we're at it.

I can think of many more things I want to have completed, but it already looks like it's shaping up to be a (very) busy year :)




Linking up to Nesting Place home goals party

Happy New Year!

It's been so long (again!) since my last post. From the looks of this blog, we haven't been working much on the ol' abode...but nothing could be farther from the truth! Between the holidays, travelling, and just life in general, I haven't quite gotten the knack of blogging in the free moments. But I'm hoping that will change this year. New Years resolution alert! I thought I'd share some decor and things I made this holiday season.

This is our mantle and tree loaded with gifts. The boughs on the mantle are real ones from the tree we cut down out front. That I haven't blogged about. I love the fresh pine smell but they drop so many needles! They especially spew a lot of needles when your cat yanks the entire thing onto the floor. Just sayin'. 

I actually made these trees last year and hid weights in the bottom to hold up our stockings. This year I just set them on the sofa table in the family room. I think they kind of look like Whoville trees.

I cut out some felt circles of different styles and sewed them together in one continuous stitch, and bing bam boom we have a garland. I think I'd like to make some with smaller circles close together for garland on the tree. Next year, next year.

I made this "snow globe" after seeing a few floating around the internet. It's an old relish jar, haha. I could probably spray paint the lid silver, but for this season it worked. I was pretty stoked when I saw something super similar at Anthropologie. Mine cost about $1. 

I saw an ornament like this on Pinterest and since I had a bag o' trees I decided to make one myself. It was hard getting the dang tree to stay in place! I ended up using a piece of paper clay and a dollop of glue.

Every year I like to make different gift tags. This year I went with felt ornaments slash tags that matched our cute wrapping paper from Target. I cut out simple triangles and decorated them in a similar way to the trees on the paper. I used a double layer of felt so you wouldn't see the embroidery thread through on the other side. It also gave them a little more heft so they could hang on the tree!

I hope you enjoyed seeing a little sneak peek of our Christmas decor! Another resolution: post more than 18 times this year. Happy 2012!