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.