Happy New Year! 2013 went so quickly, but I’m really glad we are now safely in an even year again. I HATE odd numbers, and I have no idea why.

During/After the dining room update over the summer, we moved the laundry room to a small room off the future office. My Mom helped me wallpaper one wall and I gave the whole room and ceiling a fresh coat of white paint to freshen it up. We left it that way for a while and moved to other projects in the house. The rest of the laundry room became Macy’s little space for her kennel and food/water bowls. A few weeks ago, we finally got around to adding a shelf and some decorations to the space.

We went from this:

To this!

It took me a few tries to make a curtain I liked for this room.  The window looks out over our fully fenced back yard and it sits higher than head height on the back of the house, so it doesn’t really need privacy, just some prettiness! This is the third curtain I’ve sewn for this space!! The first was a gray chevron (you can see it in the BEFORE photo) that I moved to the guest bath and the second was made of a simple white fabric, but it fit poorly so I tossed it. I think I’m happy with this one simply because I don’t want to make a fourth!

Macy, our sweet, precious golden decided to do some remodeling in this room one day while we were at work. She found a crack in the linoleum and went to town. Here it is now after many weeks of scratching and chewing.

While I was never a fan of the linoleum in this room, it was certainly better than this torn and dirty mess! We’ve decided to install a dark gray tile in this room, since it gets  a lot of dirty puppy paw traffic and a darker color will hide some of that. With 3 bright white walls and a nice sunny window, I’m not really concerned about the dark flooring making the room too dingy. BUT, we have a few projects to tackle before we get to this one… which leads me to the second part of this post: Resolutions!

I haven’t always been the most consistent with my posts here, but I do love blogging and I know this project has no chance of growth/improvement if I don’t invest some time into it. Additionally, Daniel and I aren’t the best at 100% finishing projects around the house, and we want to be better at that. So we want to finally tie up things like caulking and painting molding in the dining room and new office, finishing the sliding barn door (post on that coming soon), moving the office to it’s new space, and framing the kitchen island and chalkboard with palette wood.

We are SO excited about a few BIG projects on the horizon: new counter tops for the butler’s pantry and island (the product we’re using is mentioned at the end of this post), built-in style shelves and bench seating in the dining room, and laying tile flooring in the laundry room. While I wish these projects could get done like, immediately, Daniel and I work hard to earn enough money to pay cash for all of our house projects while paying for the rest of life and aggressively tackling our school debt. Thanks for reading and best of luck to you in your own goals this year!