A New Year

It's that time of year: the end of it. Or the beginning, if you're one of those glass-half-full types. Either way, it's the time when people decide to claim they are going to do things better in the upcoming year. I've never been into the whole New Year's Resolution thing, basically because people never keep them and I doubt I'll be any different. However, after living in this house for a year, I need to take desperate measures, so I'll give it a shot.

For 2008, I resolve to finish projects.

You might notice that in my Project Tracker (on the right side of the blog), Nursery is currently set to 95%. The nursery has been almost finished for a few months now. In fact, there are several projects that I could put on the project tracker that would require similar percentages. For example...

This is the stove that came with the house:



The whole kitchen was remodeled around 1960, and this was surely the latest and greatest high-tech food prep wizardry available at the time. It even had push-button heating levels for the stove coils. Unfortunately, only one of those coils worked, and the whole top unit was broken. We took it out and bought a new stove and microwave to replace it. Since there wasn't an electric outlet to plug in the microwave, we had to tear off a lot of the tile to run the wiring:



It all worked out rather well, and the microwave was simple to install. Looks pretty good, doesn't it?



But perhaps you've noticed the problem. I still haven't replaced the tile. Almost a year later. The cost wouldn't be exorbitant, and it wouldn't take much time. I just haven't quite gotten around to it. There are always more pressing projects to see to.

There was the floor in the bathroom on the main level. It had awful stained carpet, so we ripped out the carpet and padding, mopped and sealed the floor underneath, and put down new vinyl flooring. All it needs is caulking around the tub. That was at the beginning of February. (In case you're too horrified, we never use that tub.)

The upstairs bathroom? Ripped up the carpet there, put in new flooring, taped off everything and painted the walls, replaced the towel hooks, recaulked the tub and sink, fixed the valve on the tub, replaced the shower head, and installed one of those fancy curved shower rods. That was about half a year ago, and just any day now I'll put the baseboards up.

The steps in the front room -- we spent days tearing the horrid green carpet off of these beautiful wooden steps, then pulling out the billions of staples and filling the holes. Just need a few trim pieces to put a big "Done" stamp on that project.

There's an access door in the basement that leads under the front porch. If I were to paint it the same color we painted the rest of the basement, that room would be pretty much finished.

See a pattern here? I'm sure there's some name for this pathology. Something official sounding, like Project Completion Aversion Syndrome, perhaps. It's very annoying. Mainly when someone comes to our house for the first time, and as we're taking them on "the tour" I feel like I need to justify every 95% finished project.

So I'm going to do it. I'm going to finish all the projects from 2007 -- it can't take that long. One solid weekend of work should be plenty to finish up everything. And in 2008 I will finish each project before moving on to another.

That can't be too hard, can it?