Do you make new year’s resolutions for your home? I’ve heard a lot about them on various blogs over the past couple weeks so I decided to share our goals for our little house this year. We have slowly been chipping away at projects over the past year, and as we approach two years in this house, we have a list of  both small tweaks and major projects that we hope to accomplish by this time next year.

1) Fix our doors so that they close and latch

This probably seems insignificant but it’s easily been one of our biggest headaches since we got dogs. We have old wood doors and old door knobs, and none of them stay closed or latch. As a result, we put a baby gate at the bottom of our stairs to keep the dogs out of rooms we don’t want them in unsupervised. Tackling this job will happen ASAP, and will allow us finally to remove the ugly baby gate from our living room and (hopefully) prevent Sophie from stealing clothes out of our hampers and romping around in our bed.

2) Re-design our master bedroom

I have some blog posts lined up about our master bedroom, but the gist is that we bought a new, larger mattress, which prompted us me to redo/finish the master bedroom. I’m totally in love with the furnishings and I can’t wait to show you the finished product…when I actually finish it. It’s close but I’m still waiting on a couple items that may have to wait till February because we had a few unexpected vet and car bills this month. Oh well, such is adulthood.

2) Renovate our kitchen and first floor.

Oh, the kitchen. I have actually done a “phase 1” surface improvement since the photo above was taken, but it was just meant to make the room look a little cleaner/detract less from our adjacent living and dining rooms. Most of the houses in our neighborhood have renovated their first floors to add a bathroom, re-orient the laundry, and open up the kitchen to the dining/living room, and we definitely plan to do the same so that we can get more money out of the house when we eventually sell it. This will be a big and expensive project, so we’re still saving for it. We are so excited to get a new kitchen and FINALLY have a dishwasher. I work for a general contractor so I’m also super excited to finally tackle a large-scale project in my own house. It will likely be a combination of DIY projects and trade-specific work, since I want it to permit the work and be able to finish it within a reasonable timeframe.

3) Tackle the front yard landscaping

Last year we were the recipients of an AMAZING backyard makeover care of Lowe’s and my new blogger BFF, Summer Hogan of Simple Stylings. The front yard desperately needs to catch up to the back! Since we took the photo above, we’ve removed the security door, painted the front door, and replaced the hardware, but otherwise nothing has really changed about the yard (except now the grass is dead). I planted some bulbs in the fall hoping that the yard will look a little better in the spring, but I had no real plan. This year I’m hoping to make the front yard look a little more open and organized, and amp up our curb appeal a bit. The challenge will be to do this on a shoestring budget, since we will need most of our 2017 renovation money (aka the money we aren’t spending on attending weddings) for the first floor renovation.

What projects are you hoping to tackle in your home this year?