With a new year starting I usually like to take some time to reflect on the past year, what went well and what didn’t.
We accomplished a number of projects in 2017:
We finished our hall bath renovation in January – which you can see here. This was technically part of the fall 2016 One Room Challenge, but due to some plumbing issues we weren’t able to finish it until January.
We painted our kitchen cabinets – which you can see here. I actually repainted our kitchen cabinets just last week (yes, only a year later!) – a blog post to come soon on why I wasn’t happy with the first round and decided to tackle it again… in an easier way.
We revamped our countertops using a DIY concrete overlay on our old laminate counters – which you can see here. One of my favorite changes to the kitchen!
I went to the Haven blogging conference and met lots of wonderful new blogging friends – you can check out my recap here.
We renovated our laundry room as part of the fall One Room Challenge – you can see the reveal here!
We “completed” all of the above projects/events, which I would consider more major, among many other smaller scale projects around the house.
While we did complete so much in the past year there are a number of smaller tasks related to these projects we have mostly “completed” that leave the projects only about 90% completed, which leads me to the other 10%.
THE REMAINING 10%
It seems to be a theme with us that we start projects, nearly finish projects, and then leave the remaining tasks on the black hole of a never ending project list. Leaving projects 90% done. Please tell me we aren’t the only ones.
Things like adding crown molding to our upper kitchen cabinets where the cabinets meet the soffit and painting the trim/soffit to match the cabinet for a cleaner, more finished look.
Or fixing the trim we botched underneath the cabinet we added in the laundry room, which I conveniently cropped out of the previous laundry room picture for the One Room Challenge Reveal.
Or hanging the new light fixtures for the kitchen (a new flush mount and a pendant for above the sink)… that were bought months ago.
Or hanging the new, non-broken curtain rod for above our patio door… that I bought months and months ago.
Or actually painting the kitchen floors.
Or… well you get the picture I’m sure.
Basically we get the room to be nearly finished, totally livable, but not totally aesthetically done. Then I, or we, start new projects to make it feel like we are making progress on something. When in reality this way of doing things is bad for my sanity. Instead of being able to focus completely on 1 project at time we are constantly switching gears. Like when I decided the dining room HAD to be repainted before Thanksgiving this year, that took away a decent amount of time from instead finishing the items mentioned above.
I am not a big resolution person, but I did set a two very specific goals (among other more admin-y goals) for our house and more specifically my blog for 2018.
- Finish 1 project at a time.
- Blog in real time.
By actually finishing projects (ahem, kitchen), I will be able to blog about the finished product… instead of dragging it out for a year! It is important to me to start and continue blogging in a more “real-time” fashion. I remember more details and am better able to connect with you all that way since it will mean I am blogging more frequently (which is my favorite part about this blogging journey!).
So there you have it, my thoughts on 2017 and a few small, yet big things I hope to accomplish in 2018 as we tackle more projects (… stairway, upstairs, patio, maybe our master bath?!).
I so appreciate you following along in this blogging journey of mine and hope you stick around to see what this next year has to bring.
