A happy new year to you

Whew you guys, we made it through the holidays. I have no excuse to dislike the holidays but I always have a hard time enjoying them. They end up so busy, so expensive, and so jammed with things like work parties (seriously, we see each other every day, why so many work parties?). It didn't help that 2012 was a really bad year for a lot of people. I can't remember a year where I knew more people who lost loved ones or jobs or their health. Greg and I have been hiding out for a week, working on jigsaw puzzles and staying in our pajamas all day.

I also painted more black doors.

I've been reading everyone's "What we accomplished last year" lists on their blogs and I was feeling so lazy but then I realized that we painted the house and landscaped the front yard plus I painted a whole bunch of stuff, so that made me feel better. I still have no quarter round on the floors upstairs but the year of little things was fairly successful. We have curtains in the living room! We have a real light fixture over the kitchen sink!

Our biggies on the list for 2013 largely involve the basement. I got a gift certificate to Mr. Plywood for Christmas so we're finally going to install baseboard and window trim in Greg's movie lair.

And on the laundry side we're going to demo a useless built-in and install shelving. Greg thinks if we do this I'll stop leaving the tape measure in a different place every time I use it, which makes me laugh and laugh. Variety is the spice of life! Where is the fun in home improvement if you don't spend the first half hour looking for the hammer that your girlfriend inexplicably left in the bedroom closet?

From me to you, I wish you good health, happiness, and peace. I'll be over here poring over all the gardening catalogs I'm getting in the mail. Spring is coming!

Little things: the kitchen window

I painted the kitchen well over two years ago but I never finished painting around the window. I wanted to do a thin stripe of orange or some other funky color . . . but I couldn't find the right shade. So I ignored it and we endured this view for two years.

It didn't help that a former owner had sloppily glopped paint on the outside of the windows, obscuring the view inside.

I finally just said, "fuck it," painted the inside white and the outside trim with the color from the basement and called it good. Greg took it to the next level by scraping the outside paint from the windows and Windexing the glass.

Oh my god, it's like looking outdoors in HD, you guys. The amount of extra light that comes in to the kitchen now is staggering. We were both conflicted about cleaning the windows because we don't want birds flying into them, but then we realized that we have a bird feeder that has yet to be visited by a single bird and that we're probably okay. I have tried so hard to be the crazy lady with all the bird feeders but the birds aren't playing along.

Next up: replacing that awful light fixture (the installers did something VERY weird with the wiring or this would be done already), escutcheons on the faucet, and repainting the kitchen door. And maybe washing the rest of our windows.