We have been whittling away at small projects, with one major exception: The lower bathroom has demanded a lot of Christopher's time as he has tried to finish it up.
Before Christmas, Chris had some extra days, and he spent quite a few of them trying to get the bathroom in order - completing the rest of the drywall work (skim coats, sanding, texture) and painting the finished walls. After Christmas, with the aid of his new air compressor and nail/brad guns, he put up most of the trim (until he ran out - we need one more piece to finish out the room), and the result is quite incredible. It's hard to believe that the first room that was almost entirely gutted has become a fully functional, quite attractive bathroom. Take a look:
There's still some cleanup to do (the tools never seem to leave the house), the blind to install (a really simple one from IKEA), and the rest of the shelf to finish and paint, but it's a great space that I'm excited to direct guests to in the future (rather than having them and us all use the upstairs bathroom).
Another thing that is pretty exciting is that we just had our first Christmas season here. Even though we didn't actually celebrate here this year (we were in Nebraska), we look forward to being in the same place again next year (we've never lived in the same place two Decembers in a row).
In honor of the holidays (and the fact that I was sick of staring at bare walls after 7 months), we hung up quite a bit of our existing artwork and bought two new "paintings" and a set of bathroom shelves as Christmas gifts instead of buying things for each other.
Before Christmas, I also spent some time cleaning up/organizing/rearranging our closets and some key work areas. While cleaning for guests, I decided to change up all of the bedroom closets (amazing how easily that consolidates things), including my craft storage area. We rearranged the office so that it's a cleaner walk-through to the lower bath and cleaned most everything off of the desk itself so that it's just a nice place to sit and use our desktop. It'll be a work-in-progress until we start the renovation process, but it's a lot more functional and less awkward until we get around to that.
We're really looking forward to completing some other fairly sizable projects once I'm back at work enough to cover some of the cost of such things (my work situation is tenuous at best). They include an overhaul to the lower level office area (new floors, desk, and storage - including matching bookcases) and some rearranging of the two bedrooms that are not the master. We also have a jar into which we're going to put slips of paper with little projects (like touching up paint in a room, putting hardware onto cabinet doors, etc), with the hope to complete at least one per week. By the end of the year, we'll be at least 52 projects closer to putting the finishing touches on our home.
I also cleaned out our pantry and started a new set of seed pods in my AeroGarden. The more I spend time in my kitchen, the more I love it. Even when I accidentally make red pepper juice splash all over our white bead-board back-splash... Whoops! All it needs is some touch-up paint.
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