With February drawing to a close, it’s time once again for a goals and resolutions update. Tto be on target, I need to have 8 items marked off by the end of Feburary.
Finished:
I have actually completed 5 goals: organize craft supplies, tile bathroom floor, decluttering & organizing the house, cut 20% off grocery budget, and Using cloth diapers.
The decluttering and organizing came with the help of my Dear Mother-in-love who came to visit us from Brazil (or Brasil if you prefer). Well, I think she really came to visit little Wiggles. Either way, her visit gave me the opportunity to declutter some piles and organize my craft supplies.
I cut the grocery budget WAY down by shopping in our pantry and just not going to the grocery store. When I empty our shelves and freezer, we will be looking at buying another 1/4 or 1/2 cow and maybe we will have some early garden produce by then (one can hope).
Look for a post in the next week about our experience with cloth diapering.
In Progress:
There are a lot of goals in progress: Wedding album, make bed daily, grow a square foot garden, inviting company over, drinking water, blogging daily, keeping in touch with family and friends, doing my morning routine, paying off student loans. A lot of these are on-going projects that I won’t really be able to mark off until the end of the year.
Focus for March:
In March I am going to finish up my wedding album design. I will have to wait to print it until I can save up my hobby money. I also really must start on a baby album. Wiggles is growing too fast, and my memory is getting shorter. I have been keeping a few notes on the calendar so I can remember important dates.
We are ramping up for gardening season here, and I will be starting some seeds inside early in March.
I am also going to put in some serious effort at getting fit. As soon as the snow melts, I’m going to get outside and start running.
Canceled:
Brenton and I had some financial discussions this month and decided to cancel or reduce a few projects we had in mind for this summer. The specific projects that were canceled are building cabinets in the front bedroom, opening up the front porch, and building bookshelves for the living room. I can still work on these as my hobby money allows, but they are not in the main budget for the time being.
Basically that means I have 5 goals completed and 3 canceled for this year. Looks like I’m on schedule so far.
Finally, I’ve got a lot of projects in progress.
When you live in a 97 year old fixer-upper house, any holiday, birthday, anniversary, opportunity to give/get a gift is an opportunity to update the house just a bit more. The most recent holiday/gift opportunity was Valentines Day. What did I get for Valentines day? New tile and a high efficiency toilet in the bathroom, and matching kitchen countertops.
Bathroom Before:
The floor was plywood painted over with Kilz primer. Before we bought, Brenton and I actually had to fix a hole in the floor (from frozen pipes last winter) and paint the plywood. Before that there had been carpet that the previous owner tore out. The toilet was ancient. The bolts holding the tank on were rusted to the point that if I bumped the toilet tank, the water would splash out onto the floor. The cold water coming in the house from causes lots of condensation on the tank and dripping down onto the floor.
After: newly installed high efficiency toilet (uses 1.28 gal per flush), $88 home depot. Peel and stick laminate tile, bought by the previous owner, but never installed. The new flooring is SO much easier to sweep and mop, not to mention how much better the bathroom looks and feels.
Kitchen Before:
These pictures were taken as we moved in. On one side, the countertops were practically new (probablly installed with the new dishwasher). On the other side of the kitchen the countertops were a mishmash of wooden things. One cabinet had a scary butcher block. Scary because no matter how much I scrubbed it, gross stuff kept coming out. On the other side of the stove, a drawer set had a poorly fit plywood frame built around it as a just-for-now measure.
Kitchen After:
In a moment of brilliance, we decided to see if we could find a match to the practically new countertop already in the kitchen. One trip to Home Depot revealed that the pattern was Mystic Dawn and Home Depot always had it in stock! In the process of all this, we found that the cabinets aren’t actually attached to the wall or floor. Doing what any good woman would do, I re-arranged my kitchen. The drawers got moved to the left side of the stove and the stove was pushed off center on the wall. This gives me 18 inches of counter on the left side and 38 inches on the right. The board in the foreground of the picture is a bookshelf that, when finished, will become a home for my cookbooks and some kitchen toys for Wiggles.
You can also just barely see on the right top corner of the after picture, there is a new cabinet on the wall (found in the garage).
Price breakdown: 6 ft countertop, $68 home depot
1 wall end piece: $20
2 end finishing kits: $11
Happy Wife thrilled with a completely practical gift: Priceless!
by Sunny Daydreame on February 25, 2009
in Gardening
The Weather outside is frightful:
But inside, I have a little bit of hope growing in my windowsill.
“Short and sweet” carrots.
