Resolutions and ideas for 2012

I’m a few days late, but that’s okay (being prompt wasn’t a resolution). It’s that time of year where everyone makes bold resolutions and comes up with ideas and accomplishments for the following year. Since it’s starting to get a bit colder outside, I won’t be doing any woodworking over the next few months, at least, not until spring. So I’ll need something to blog about, right? Well, here are a few (of the many) things on my list for 2012.

1 . Paint – We still have at least three rooms upstairs (both guest rooms and a bathroom) that need a new coat of paint. Our main guest room will be pretty easy once we decide on a color. The other, smaller bedroom will take a bit more effort because of the “awesome” blue trim that goes all along the base of the room.

2. Another bathroom remodel (maybe) – As mentioned above, we have a bathroom that needs a coat of paint. Okay, it needs a lot more than that, but as I learned while renovating a half bath, I hate doing bathrooms. That being said, we need to do something with this bathroom, because it is a true eye sore.

3. Replace the kitchen ceiling fan – I’ve blogged about this briefly, but it has to go. Now that we’ve done so much work on the first floor of the house, this (along with the ugly “boob” lights) are all that remain. So, it’s time to bite the bullet and get rid of this thing. 

4. Build more stuff – Once spring time hits, I’ll hopefully be outside building more furniture. On the list of things to build are side tables for the living room, nightstands for our bedroom and potentially a farmhouse bedframe for the guest room. Yeah, we want our guest to be sleeping in style.

*image courtesy of Ana-white.com

5. Landscaping – This is a tough one, because neither of us have a green thumb. The yard, as small as it is, isn’t too bad, but there are a few areas that could use a little love. Mainly, we have a tree in our backyard that is sectioned off with small old tree stumps. Those tree stumps now have grown a mushroom like mold and they don’t look that great. It’s time to ditch those and come up with a long term plan that is functional and looks nice. Oh, and mulch…boy do we need mulch.

6. Blog maintenance - This one is a doozy because it’s all background work that you’ll probably not even notice, that is, unless you are like my mom who can’t see any of the photos I post because flickr is blocked at her work. Lame. So, in order to remedy that, I will hopefully migrate all the photos onto this site directly, and then everyone should be able to see them super easy, and it should also help with page load times. Again, it’s a little thing, but hopefully effective.

7. Learn something new – Anything really. I am someone who needs to constantly be learning, it’s just in my nature. I learned how to create webpages, blog, build stuff, fix stuff, yell at stuff…and so on all by just doing it. I hope to keep that moving forward over the course of 2012, and by year’s end, have something completely new under my belt, and ready to try something different in 2013.

8. Decorate more – Lastly (for now), one thing we really need to do in our house is make it more personal. We both know this. We don’t have much on our walls around the house. Part of that is because we haven’t had a lot of furniture until recently, so it’s hard to come up with a plan when you’ve got nothing. This year we really want to get more photos up, some art, and other things put up around the house.  It’s the little things that make the biggest difference, don’t you think?

So there you have it faithful readers, a list of 8 things I’d like to accomplish for 2012. I left a lot off the list (and yes, I actually wrote out a list), but these are the main areas I’d like to focus on for now. Notice “go to the gym, eat better, be proactive” aren’t all on the list, because that’s a given, and usually by my birthday I’ve given up on most of that. I will, however, eat more cookies, that I do promise.