Late Update

OK, so February is already half way over and the last time I gave you an update was . . . let me see . . . Holy Cow, 28 days!.  Sorry about that.  Life's been busy, but I recently worked it out so that I won't be working my second job nearly as much.  Hopefully this'll give me a better work-life balance.

Enough about that, onto the bedroom!  We got quite a bit of work done on the bedroom.  It feels like a real bedroom now, and not just a room with a bed and furniture in it.  We got rid of that giant bedframe, installed a bunch of Ikea furniture and have moved/sorted most of the clothes and items.  On that front there's still some work to be done, but I'd say we got like 80-90% of the bedroom project done. Isn't it always that last 10% that seems to be the hardest to finish?  Must be the fact that you've already accomplished so much and now the improvements you see are only marginal.  Oh well.

I was hoping to move on to working on the garage, but so far February seems to be a recuperating month.  Or maybe a prioritizing month?  It's still up in the air.  Don't get me wrong, we've done some work on the garage so far, but nothing as dedicated as the bedroom.  Our social activities have increased again (or at least mine have) which has cut into the project productive time.  That's the big issue isn't it?  You want all these rewards and goals but you have to work towards them and more than that, you have to figure out what you're going to cut back on in order to achieve them.  It's more than just adding to your plate.  It's really about replacing something that's already on your plate with the new stuff.  Figuring out what it is you're currently doing that is less impactful than what you're striving for.  I'll admit that is no easy task for myself.

Right now our biggest goals are to 1) get out of debt and 2) get healthy enough (mentally and physically) to have a kid.  In reality, the get out of debt goal ties into the whole kid thing as well.  So I guess it could be summed up to get into a stable enough situation (mentally, physically, and financially) so that we won't freak out over the idea of trying to start a family.  We've always sort of had that goal, but this year it looks like we're making the biggest concerted effort towards it.  Maybe I just need to focus on the big picture to remind me of what's important.  Maybe?

Bedroom Progress

Progress has been made!  We've put together Ikea furniture, installed drawers, and even put clothes and a few objects in their new locations.  There's still more drawers to be installed and filled and we're still debating on whether we want to replace the dresser with a bigger, more fitting, dresser.  Plus there are still boxes of items we need to go through
, and a giant bed to dispose of some how.

We have hit a snag in our motivation in all this: our tub has a crack.  It's not a very big crack, yet, but it does kind of defeat the purpose of the tub, which is to hold water.  We remodeled the bathroom a year or two ago with a friend, and it was kind of a learning experience for us.  I've never remodeled a room before and so I was learning the various step needed to do it, figuring it was like putting together a Lego set, but with more complicated pieces.  It's a little more complicated than that.  Anyways, we weren't really planning on having to redo the bathroom so soon; finish what started, sure, but not completely restart it.  So now we're just going to patch it up, and be careful. Hopefully it'll hold together until we save enough (and research enough) to have someone come in and redo the bathroom.

Stupid tub crack, doesn't even glow like on Dr Who

(I have now figured out that the garage will have to be it's own Monthly Challenge).

Monthly Challenges instead of Resolutions

Every year around this time, like most people, I make resolutions or goals for the whole year.  And usually by September I've forgotten what they were.  This year I'm going to try a twist.  Instead of a year long resolution to do 50 different things, I'm going to break it up into month long challenges. For 1 month I'll focus on 1 goal, and see how close I can come towards achieving it.  Maybe for 1 month I'll try to read as many books as I can, another month I'll learn about painting minis and paint my board game pieces.  One month might be a frugal month, where I try to save as much money as possible. Another month I might see if can learn to play an instrument within the allotted time or pull off a handstand.  These are all ideas of things I'd like to try accomplish that I've never really gotten around to doing.  As another motivator, I can document my progress here on the blog, maybe with updates every Thursday.  That way I have a way to see that progress actually was made.

For January, I'm thinking that the challenge will be to get the bedroom and garage clean and organized.  The bedroom has been in a state of transition ever since we got the house.  We've never gotten it to a state that we feel happy with and it's about time we reconciled that.  We've already made some progress (at least in the bedroom), by replacing the giant old bed with a simple frame and installing some Ikea items, but there's still a lot of sorting and organizing that needs to be done.

The current condition of the bedroom

Our closet with its recent Ikea addition

That looks entirely doable with in a month, but that's only because we moved a bunch of stuff that used to be in there into other rooms, which is a little unfair to the other rooms.  Reasonably, we'll have to find homes for all those things as well.  Some of them will be brought back into the room and others will find homes elsewhere, like possibly Goodwill, or the dump.

The guest room, currently hosting various bedroom items.

The old giant dresser, disheveled

The old headboard, now an awkward bookcase in the hall.

And that's just the bedroom.  The garage is a whole other beast to deal with.  Since we've had the house I think it's been in a usable state maybe 3 times.  We've had to get a storage unit, just so we can move some items out that we plan to go through later.  The plan is to get it to point that we can easily store what we need in there and also have enough space for Emily to work in it like it was her studio.  I think it's an achievable goal, even if it is a little daunting.  Hopefully the momentum of getting the bedroom done will carry us through the garage. Hopefully.

Surprisingly, not the worst condition it's ever been in.