A new year. A new to-do list.

A new year. A new to-do list.

Before he came down with a nasty case of the flu, Andy and I sat down to put together a list of all the projects we want to do around the house this year. If you haven’t noticed by now, I love lists, because I love crossing things off lists! This list might be a bit ambitious, but each one of these is going to make us so happy. So here’s what we want to do…

1. Finish the kitchen. Our kitchen is about 90% done, which is awesome, but to consider it really finished we need to put up some open shelves and new curtains, and repaint our rolling kitchen island to match our cabinets.

2. Finish the master bath. The room has been gutted, but Andy and I are going to do the floor and wainscoting ourselves before the contractors come back to put in the plumbing.

3. Finish the pantry. Our plan is to add a wall of shelves and tons of storage space to the pantry, and we want to turn one corner into a “mud room”… or I guess, a “mud corner.”

4. Paint and paint and paint some more. This probably could be considered part of #1 and #3, but I’m thinking of painting as a big project unto itself. Our plan is to paint the kitchen, pantry, and hallway outside the kitchen in the same shade of gray, and then all of the trim is getting painted white (the hallway has black trim now). I’m hoping to start on this project next week. So.Much.Painting.

5. Replace the back door. There’s a gorgeous old door in our pantry that doesn’t go anywhere (the original back door?) but it’s in bad shape. I’d love to refinish that door and use it to replace the more boring back door we have now. I’m not 100% sure this is possible, but I really want to give it a try.

6. Remove shutters from pantry window. For some reason, the window in our pantry has been boarded up with shutters, so we’d love to remove the shutters and let the light shine in again. This will probably require repairing whatever problem caused this window to be shuttered in the first place.

7. Replace the rumpus room lights. Our rumpus/TV room has some old track lighting that we just can’t stand, so we’d LOVE to replace that with a pendant light or two.

8. Renovate both offices. We need to clean both of these rooms out, refinish the floors, repaint the walls, and get all new furniture.

9. Clean out and paint the attic. We have a finished third floor attic with two bedrooms and a half bath, and the whole thing is full of junk right now. I mean, totally and utterly full of junk. I’d love to finally get all of that cleaned up, thrown out and organized, and then repaint the whole space.

10. Have the exterior of our house and garage painted. We want to get this done asap in the spring. At least this is one painting project that I don’t have to do!

So the theme of 2014 is PAINT. And also ORGANIZE. I’m so excited to get started on these projects, and, even more than that, I want to start crossing these things off our list! What about you? What projects are you planning to do this year? I’d love to hear about it!