Changes for 2014

I don't know about you all, but we had a pretty good 2013. And now it's 2014, which should be pretty good too. And with the New Year comes a time for resolutions, making fresh starts, and scribbling out the 2013 when you write the date incorrectly. And while I'm not too into resolutions, this seems like a decent time to make a few changes and maybe set a few goals (which are totally different than resolutions...). And hopefully by sharing some of these with you it will motivate us to follow through.

House Goals

Just as scarcity drives the economy, our inability to do all of our projects at once will mean that some things will get done this year and some won't make the cut. But we have narrowed our list down to at least a few things we would like to tackle this year.

We barely touched the yard or exterior of the house in 2013. There was enough work to be done inside of the house that we didn't make it priority. So we would like to get started on some projects outside this spring/summer. I've updated the "Outside" section of Our List to roughly show the order in which improvements can or might happen.

There are a few larger projects that we want to get done inside the house this year: paint the upstairs hallways and stairwell, add overhead light fixtures in all the bedrooms and stairwell, remodel and organize the master bedroom closet, and remodel the bathroom downstairs. We already have paint picked out for the hallway, we're hoping to be able to work on the lights as early as next month, and the closet shouldn't be too bad to do either. The bathroom will be the real challenge. Bathroom remodels are usually very time consuming and expensive, so hopefully we can git 'r done.

We also would like to buy a few things. I'd like a manly recliner in the family room so that I can watch football while lounging in brown leather comfort and Leslie would like something to store our sheet music in. We currently have a big Rubbermaid tub full of music, but that isn't exactly the aesthetic that Leslie would like in the living room next to the piano. We'll probably hit up the antique store I lived by a few summers ago to try to find something a little more out of the ordinary.

I also have a few things that I'd like to make this year. We have a lot of bottles of wine, thanks mostly to a monthly wine club subscription that we got as a wedding present. Right now they're stored in the dry sink we use as a bar, but I'd like something a little more fun to keep them all in. I want to either find a cool looking piece of furniture and modify it or build something from scratch. I also want to build a shelving system to hold all of our movies. Our current DVD storage shelving (picked up at Meijer or Target when living in our apartment) is overflowing.

Family and Personal Goals

It's way too easy to spend an entire evening watching TV. We both like reading, but don't make nearly as much time for it as we would like (and by that I mean that I don't make time for it at all). I've made a goal for myself of reading at least 20 books this year. That's a little less than one every two weeks, so hopefully this will give me enough flexibility that I can meet my goal even if a few weeks are really hectic or if some of the books I read are pretty long.

Another thing we would like to start doing more is meal planning and trying new recipes. We used to do a good job planning out what we would eat for the week, going to the store to get what we needed, and then following our plan (or at least mostly). This has dropped off in the last six months and it would be nice to get back to it. We also want to try at least 20 new recipes (again, not quite one every two weeks). Time to put all these cookbooks we have to use!

These two goals should affect the blog a bit. Ideally, we would add a third post that would alternate between books and food each week. With that system we would maybe go to a "Life" post on Monday, alternate between "Books" and "Food" on Wednesday, and then a "House" post on Friday. Plus, for those of you who may not care too much about one of those categories, it would be easy to know which day to skip reading. I think we would have to see how that works out, since it's a lot of posts. But it's an option.

And that should about do it for this year's goals. Like I said, hopefully by putting what we want to accomplish on here it will help us get it all done. Thank you all again for your continued interest (it's amazing to see that people actually read this!) and we wish you all the best in this New Year.