Our 2012 To-Do List

Yesterday we took a look back on how B and I did on our 2011 to-do list for our home. We are pretty happy with the outcome, considering all of the stuff that happened last year. This years list is no less ambitious and we're ready to cross of the items we didn't complete last year, and tackle some new items as well! To keep us more organized, I've divided our list up by the different rooms/spaces in our home. Here's what we're looking at for this year...

Front Exterior

Finish Painting the front deck: We never quite finished this step back in July when we painted the entire front of our home. So this needs to happen this spring or summer!


Add Railing to the Front Deck Stairs: We don't have a ton of stairs, but it's definitely important for safety reasons - especially, in the winter months. 

Find and Put up a New House Number: Would you believe we haven’t had a number on our home since we demolished the original front entrance back in November of 2010? We need to rectify this situation this year… it’s just a matter of finding the perfect number plaque for our home! The search is on!!

Front Entrance

Organize The Front Closet: When we built the front entrance, we added in a nice big closet to help with storage and organization around here. Sadly, it’s only provided storage and is not very organized. This year I’d love to add some new shoe storage, as I plan to repurpose a trunk that we keep in there for something else in our home.

Living Room

Install A New Railing: The staircase to our basement is a bit of a death trap. When we did the basement reno two years back, we ripped out the wall next to the basement stairs so we could get the old tub out, and move our new washer and dryer in. We loved how not having the wall made our living room feel larger… but we just haven’t got around to putting the new railing in yet. This has to happen this year now that so many friends have kids that our mobile… and I know little Halle will start crawling at any time now!

Put in New Flooring and Built-ins: Putting in the new railing will also mean ripping the old worn out, smelly carpet on our stairs… and in part of the living room. When we do this, we also hope to take up the old parquet and lay some nice new hardwood in the living room. At the same time, we will be hiring my talented father to build us some nice new built-ins on either side of the fireplace! I think this is the project that I am most excited about!

Clean and Paint the Brick on the Fireplace and install a new Mantel: As you may remember, when we embarked on painting the living room, we also took the initiative to rip the old brick off of our fireplace. We exposed the original brick fireplace, which as beautiful as it is, requires a little TLC. After some humming and hawing and staring at it everyday, we have decided that when we do this room in full, painting that old brick will be our best bet. We’ve already decided on colour, you’ll just have to wait and see what we do. Of course, when all of this is going down, a new mantel will also be added on!

Hang Our Gallery Wall: We will be putting a gallery wall of photos along our staircase, that includes some family photos and other fun objects… but this will have to wait until after we’re finished all the up and down that comes with our bathroom renovation.

Finish Recovering My Garage Sale Chair: That poor chair has been sitting neglected in our garage for close to two years!! I’m pretty sure I have finally found the right fabric, so I’m ready to tackle that pretty thing, and give it a new home in our living room! It’s about time!

Find A New Floor Lamp: We’ve been living with my college grade IKEA lamp forever… and it’s time to upgrade. We’ve been hunting for a while for the perfect floor lamp at the perfect price point, and so far no luck. I have a feeling this will be our year though!

Kitchen

Install Seating Bench with Storage for our Kitchen Table: With hopes of a full kitchen reno in 2013, our to-do list for this room is quite small right now. The position of the dining area will not change with the reno, so our only hope is to add a built-in seating bench, like Lindsay’s that will give us a much more cozy nook for dining, and provide us with some much needed extra storage.

Find an Inexpensive and Temporary Solution for some Matching Window Coverings: Our two windows in the kitchen have some grungy, mismatched coverings that I have just been choosing to turn a blind eye too for the last 2.5 years. Well, NO MORE! I have some ideas for this and plan to do something about it soon.

Upstairs Bathroom

Finish Our Bathroom Reno: Updates on where we stand this moment to come tomorrow… but we hope we can cross this off of our list this month! Cross those fingers for us!

Master Bedroom

Hem our Curtains: Those bad boys are HEAVY and are getting walked on and pulled and seriously need to be shortened to a proper length for our room. I’ve been putting it off for the last year and now, it finally needs to happen.

Halle’s Nursery

Update Halle’s Gallery Wall: I have a few things up my sleeve that I hope to add to her little gallery wall. It will fill it up and make it a bit more fun… and even more sentimental!

Make Halle a Toy Box: We have a trunk in our front closet that  would work perfectly as Halle’s toy box… but first we really need to purge, clean and organize that space better so that we can lose the trunk. I already have plans for this piece so I am so ready to get that closet whipped into shape!

Basement Living Room

Finish Trim and Painting: Since the basement is useable, all of the finishing touches down there kind of fell to the bottom of our priorities. But no more! This space does double as a guest room, and I would like to make it was welcoming as possible for our family and friends that come to stay.

Finish the Cushion For Our Seating Bench: The foam and the fabric are already at my parents. Now I just need to find the time to head over with the zipper so that my Mother and I can sew it up. This will be a very welcome addition to our basement space.

Hang Our Gallery Wall: We plan to hang a bunch of artwork that  we have both collected on our worldly travels, on the wall between the bathroom and the laundry room. Hopefully we can do this once the laundry room finally gets some doors (yes, that is on our list as well!!)

Basement Bathroom


 

Add a Glass Wall to the Shower: The temporary shower curtain we are using at the moment is not ideal… so hopefully we can find the time and money to install a nice glass wall in there.

Office/Laundry Room

Put up Laundry Room Doors: We have the doors, and just like so many other projects, they are waiting in our garage for us to get them up! There will have to be an addition to the wall added since our doors are not as wide as we anticipated, and alterations will have to be made to the doors so they are shorter… but boy will it be nice to finally have proper doors.

Find a New Filing Solution: We have so many important papers that sadly just end up piled on my desk, making them hard to find and my desk impossible to use. We only have one small plastic filing cabinet and I have been searching high and low for a much bigger and more stylish option for quite some time now. We NEED to be more organized in this house!

Backyard

Build A New Deck: The old deck out back is rotting and not very safe. We need to build a safer, and much prettier deck – both for Halle’s safety, as well as for our love of outdoor entertaining!

Landscape the Backyard: This should ideally happen the same time as we build the deck. The previous owners were clearly not much for gardening, and I’m embarrassed to say we haven’t done much better back there up till now. Hopefully this spring we can turn that eyesore around and get ready for a summer of outdoor entertaining!

On top of all of this, I am hoping that this is the year for a blog face-lift – It is definitely in need of a new look and some better organization. I also have a few of my own goals I am working towards that I hope I will get to share with you this year as well!

2012 will most definitely be a very exciting and busy year for us… but I am SO ready for it! What do you have on your list of things you’d like to accomplish in 2012?

ALSO - I forgot to mention yesterday that I was visiting Hilary over at My So-Called Home, answering some questions on my blogging experience. It's all part of celebrating Hilary's first Blogiversary - so pop on over and see what some other great bloggers said too, and of course send congrats to Hilary on one year of blogging!