Happy Birthday to the Blog!

From the first post on June 14, 2010

This little blog turns 1 year old today.  It's been quite a year.   Thank you to all of you who read this thing!  We are humbled by the stats on the the analytics, you come from all over the country and all over the globe.  So a BIG THANK YOU to all of you who keep coming back, it means a lot to us.  You keep us motivated to keep pushing forward.

I started this blog a year ago with a very ambitious to-do list.  So ambitious we laugh about it now, considering the list took us more than a year to complete instead of the 3 weeks I imagined. It included:

1. Have an electrician add more circuits to our 5 circuit house
2. Have a plumber replace corroded pipes in the basement, add a water line for the fridge, hook up our bathroom plumbing.
3. Prep, prime and paint all of the closets
4. Finish the main bathroom
5. Redo the kitchen with paint, new counters, new sink, etc.
6. Paint the dining room
7. Paint the living room
8. Scrape, sand, prime and paint dining room and living room windows
9. Remove carpet from the upstairs office
10. Remove carpet from the guest room
11. Move all of our boxes from the apartment to the house

How naive we were back then!   We had no sense of the time it takes to do even the most simple tasks.  Even when we realized we wouldn't get it all in before we moved, we thought it would at least be done mid-to-late summer.   Hah!   We did get the bathroom functional shortly after we moved in, but we didn't complete it until August.  We didn't get the kitchen done until October.  And we didn't get to the closets until February, nor the guest room until March/April, and we just removed the carpet in the office last week!  And we have yet to get to any windows.

However we did a lot more than that list too.  We moved into our master bedroom in August, we improved the dining room with sliding doors and had a deck built in November, we redid the sun room in January, and we’ve completed a lot of gardening projects in the spring.   Over time we've made our living room more livable, we've started decorating, and so much more.

Like I said, it's been quite a year here on the blog.   And I thought it would be a good idea (since a big part of this for me is motivation) to make a new list for this upcoming year.   Hopefully something that's a little more feasible than the list I wrote last year.

1. Be greener
I want us to look at ways to conserve energy, reduce our carbon footprint and make improvements on the house that are more environmentally friendly.   Like how we added the ceiling fans upstairs and an attic fan in the attic.  And built a big organic garden.

2. Re-evaluate our space
Take a look at how we are using the rooms now that we've lived here for a while.   How could we more efficiently use the space?  What improvements can we make?  How can make things more organized?

3. Redo the half bath
I'm tired of calling this room "the outhouse" and being embarrassed when people see it.

4. Take on more complex woodworking projects
I'm not saying we should learn how to build anything fancy, but I think we're ready to take things up a notch in the building department.  We want to finish building the radiator covers and move on to something a little more exciting.

5. Crown molding
I'd really like to finally add crown molding to the rooms upstairs and the sun room downstairs.

6. Increase Curb appeal
While last year we repainted the porch and added some fresh new landscaping, we still have a long way to go.  I've wanted to put up shutters on the front since we moved in.  I'd also like to add window boxes, new porch lights, repaint the front door, add a door knocker, etc.

7. Keep building our backyard oasis
I have a vision in my head of where I want our backyard to eventually be.   It's pretty ambitious and it's going to take a long time to get there, so my goal this year for our backyard is to not give up on the dream and keep adding to it.

8. Organize our storage spaces.
The inside of our garage is a disaster.  Our basement is often unwalkable and hazardous for doing laundry.  We need some serious work in the organization department and need to get some shelving, plastic tubs and a label maker.