The Weekender

A long time ago, I played with the idea of naming my Friday post “The Weekender” but not too long after, a much more well known blog that I love started doing it and I didn’t want to look like I was copying them. But ya know what? It’s okay. It’s just a post title and I have very few readers and even fewer that read other home improvement blogs so I’m going to start using it. So here is my first Friday post in a while filled with random thoughts or things going on in our lives and it’s a long one!

You know what I love most about the One Room Challenge? It forces me to post every week. When it’s over I always slack on posting whether I finished my space or not. Spoiler alert: we didn’t finish our outdoor living space and now it’s too cold to use anyway so we’ll hold off until Spring. We’ve had a much rainier fall than normal and so even if we had finished we wouldn’t have been able to use it much. We did pour the last two pavers (and have left the forms on for over a week…whoops!) and Kyle made some progress on the arbor. We’re setting that project aside until warmer weather comes back in the Spring but we have plenty of stuff inside to focus on.

OG is 11 months old as of today and I just am not emotionally ready for the 1st birthday. I’ve already been planning and ordering decorations but it’s starting to feel too real now. This year has absolutely flown by and it’s so bittersweet. I love watching her grow and change but I already miss some of those newborn and young infant characteristics.

Here’s a little sneak peak of the direction her party is going – yes, that is a pink sequin table cloth. I have also ordered approximately 1,204,813,057,395,372 balloons and I’ve cleared the Target Dollar Spot of all of their rose gold bottle brush trees every time they’ve stocked them so we’ll see what I end up doing with all of those.

Since we are hosting her (or more honestly, our) party at our house, there are some things downstairs we need to at least temporarily take care of. You might remember that a while back I talked about taking up some of the tile between the kitchen and foyer. Well, I took the tile up but we haven’t touched it since which means we currently have 3 layers of flooring exposed.

Our weekends in December are already busy so we won’t be able to completely fix it before the party but we are going to temporarily lay down some flooring just to cover the gap. We also need to put a bullnose flooring piece down where you step down into the front room from the foyer and we need to finish painting at least the dining room and if we have time, the family room. We’re also missing loads of trim but since we need to flip the flooring around downstairs it doesn’t make much sense to install baseboards and door trim just to take it all back out a week later to finish the floors so we’ll just need to make sure no nails or staples are sticking out since there will be kids running around.

Can you guys believe there are less than 3 weeks until Christmas?! I usually have my shopping done by now but I still have a few things left to buy and one present to go pick up. Luckily the ones left to buy are all gift cards but half of them will need to be mailed and we need to ship some of the other gifts. Ahhhh. We’ve been slowly decorating and have the inside pretty much taken care of but all we have outside is a tree and a polar bear on our porch. There are still pumpkins in our front yard that need to be moved and we at least need to set up our cheater lights that project onto the house.

A few years ago vs. this year:

I think 2019 is going to be a major budget year for us as far as house projects go but once I have a list of what we’re thinking about tackling I’ll be sure to share it here. I also need to take a look back at what we had hoped to get done this year and compare it to what we actually got done. My guess is we didn’t check off most of the list but we already knew that would be a major possibility so I’m not too bummed about it.

Happy weekend!