House Projects
There are too many to list ranging from HUGE to tiny. I'm trying to remind myself to write them down when i think of them and dissect them later.
Front Yard
We painted the front door, and with some major help from our parents, we cleaned up the yard, planted some flowers, and added some curb appeal. The plan is to keep our plants alive and growing, and replace the pine straw with mulch. Also need to seal the wood on the front porch, and I am chomping at the bit for patio furniture but haven't found the right set that meets our wants and our budget.
Back Yard
Unlike the front, the backyard is our pups domain. The last quarter of it was full of brush and bush-like greenery, but when our fence got installed, it lost all resemblance to an intentional gardening choice and looked like weeds. Again, thanks to some major help from parents we cleaned everything out to a blank slate. Unfortunately, weeds are persistent buggers and have found their way back. So this time, we need to clean it out again, lay grass seed, and protect it with pine-straw. Also want take up the sod and pour gravel by our A/C unit and grill and figure our storage for our yard tools. Long-term we want to think about a shed, staining or sealing our fence, and a paved patio area or a path to the driveway, but for right now we have bigger and less expensive fish to fry.
Office Nook
This one is in progress. I love having our desk and computer in our living space. Eventually, yes, we want an office, but for our lifestyle right now its so much better than a eat-in kitchen. Plus, we have the island and barstools for that! The big to-do for this area was figuring out storage. We decided on a low-profile leaning bookshelf we could put storage boxes and the printer on, and opted for white so it matched the nearby kitchen, and could easily get moved somewhere later if we change our minds. Now we wait till it arrives...
Artwork
Uggghhhh... I hate admitting to this one. Without restraint my house would look like a gallery wall everywhere - art and pictures hanging on every foot of every wall. i'm slowly learning the art of restraint. One problem is, we've accumulated such an eclectic collection that nothing really goes together. I'm not aiming for matchy-matchy, but putting our robots painted on wood next to our arabic calligraphy is just weird. I am dying to get art on our walls, but am struggling where to put things, so this one will probably always be a work in progress, and I'm constantly on the prowl for frames, prints, and art I like.
Art-sy Projects
Some of the ideas that come to light.
Wedding Album
Brad and I got married in January 2015, and I have yet to make a wedding album. Our wedding was beautiful! It deserves an album. I wanted something I could add in our invites and other odds-and-ends I saved from our wedding, so I opted for more of a scrap-book style photo album (KINSHO Photo Journal). For the most part its just going to contain pictures, but I wanted the freedom to add more if I wanted. I also opted to print our photos before I narrowed them down as I thought it would be fun to go through them in person and relive everything again. Now I am stuck with the daunting task of picking ~200 photos out of ~2000 photos, and am slightly regretting my decision. There are piles of photos EVERYWHERE. I'm in the sorting phase.
Recipe Book
I like to cook, but unlike my talented husband, I need a cookbook, ingredients, and a plan to make something worth eating. Without those, you are pretty much guaranteed a meal of spaghetti and roasted brussels sprouts (even though in my defense, its damn good!). The idea of this was to collect recipes I've tried, made successfully, and liked, so that when it comes to grocery-buying-time, I have a book of stuff we like, and can easily flip through and create a list of stuff I need to get. Relatively easy - yes. Unfortunately I got this idea in my head that I wanted to hand-write every recipe and of course, make the whole thing pretty. My plan is to table 'pretty' for now and focus on just collecting winner recipes. I can always go back later as of right now, I have clear paper protectors I'm just showing recipes into.
The Blog
Puh-lease. I'll just say its not being updated as much as I'd planned.
Perpetual Calendar
I wanted to end on a good note, so here is a project I actually finished! I'm a bit of a calendar junky. I have about four I maintain regularly digitally, two of which also get written down in a planner along with my constant to-do list (I'm dipping my toes into bullet journaling). If 6 calendars wasn't enough, I missed having a visual at home of trips, events, etc. - so I made one! We wipe it clean every month, and my sweet husband got me chalk markers which work a infinitely better than the original plan of dry-erase. I still want to paint the matting blue or find a smaller frame (again, think pretty), but for the most part, I'm filing this under 'Done'.
