Summer List of Things to Do

Now that I'm finished with my internship (WHAT?!?!) I can focus on doing some serious organizing around the house this summer!

I made a list of projects/wish-list purchases that we'd like to get done or buy this summer.  This list is probably not all inclusive, but I would like to challenge myself to see how many things I can knock off this list by early August.

• White curtains in dining room (right now I have black-out curtains in a chocolate brown shade, and even though I have them pulled to the side, it still darkens the room more than I'd like)
• New dining room chairs.  (the ones we have are this wicker/rattan material.  My mother-in-law gave them to us when she gave us our dining room table when she moved into her new house and purchased a different table and chairs.  The table is great-- I love it.  It's a big long rectangle and I can sit a lot of people around it.  The chairs, however, aren't my favorite. They're big and bulky and I cannot strap a booster seat to them-- which meant I had to hang onto two of my older dining room chairs so that my boys could have booster seats a few years ago.  Now that they're out of booster seats, Avery is just getting to the age where she can sit in a booster seat rather than a high chair.  I'd like to give Aaron's dad the original dining chairs (since he has the other four, plus our old dining table), but I need to keep at least one of these chairs for Avery. The boys aren't quite strong enough to maneuver the wicker chairs, so I'd like to get something a little more streamlined that they can scoot in and out easily.  And the biggest reason of all is that the wicker chairs are hard to clean.  A few weeks ago, Avery was sitting in my lap at the table when she suddenly got sick and vomited everywhere, to include the dining chair.  I could not, for the life of me, get all of the curdled milk out of the intricacies of the wicker chair.  Gross, I know. I'd like to have something smaller, more streamlined, and easier to clean!)
• Canvas of Avery for the dining room.  I currently have a canvas of both boys, and now that Avery is nearly two I suppose I should start putting up some nice photos of her around the house too.  Can you tell I've been busy lately?  Now that I have extra time to evaluate some things, I'm trying to make sure I hit all the "mom" items on my list. 
• Bunk beds for boys. (This is still up in the air.  Part of me wants them to have bunk beds so that they have extra space to play in their room-- our rooms are quite small.  But part of me doesn't want to deal with teaching them to make the bed from bunk beds, and I also have a sneaky suspicion that if I put bunk beds in their room that they would suddenly feel like they were world-class stunt doubles and attempt triple salchows from the top bunk.)
• Dresser for Noah. (Sweet little Noah.  He's been using half of the top drawer and the full bottom drawer for all of his clothes for five years now.  When he was born, I combined his clothes into Michael's four-drawer dresser.  Now that they're bigger and their clothes are bigger, it's about time both of them have their own full dressers to use.  This is also a case for getting bunk beds so I'd actually have space for a dresser in their room.  Currently, their single dresser is in the closet.)
• TV & TV stand. (When we bought our TV eight years ago, I assumed it could hang on the wall.  We bought an entertainment center shortly before buying the TV, so we didn't need to hang the TV on the wall, but I always assumed we could if we wanted.  I was wrong. The boys didn't mess with the TV while growing up, but Avery is another story.  I'm so worried that she'll knock it onto herself and I mentioned hanging it from the wall a month or so ago and that's when Aaron broke the news that it isn't capable of being hung on the wall.  We've toyed with the idea of getting a TV, but we've resisted since we don't technically need one. This would be a purchase justified for safety reasons, but we know we can put it off for a while too.  The TV stand is showing wear-and-tear now that it's eight years old and wasn't the most expensive purchase at the time.  One of the drawers was dropped when we moved into this house three years ago, which is fine with me.  I can get past cosmetic issues.  One of the glass cabinet doors randomly fell off about a year ago.  That was annoying since it closed off the DVDs, and Avery started making a game of opening every box and throwing DVD discs on the living room floor.  So now I have the DVDs on some of the side shelves, (which means I can't see any of my knick knacks) but she's tall enough enough now that she can pull them off of there, too, which also causes a mess and will cause a bigger mess if she pulls the glass shelf down too.)
• Office clean out.  We actually did most of this one this past week!  We cleared out all of the random boxes on the floor and actually have space in here again!  I have some work to do on the bookshelf in here, and I really prefer a nearly empty desk and right now it's covered with some of my internship binders and paperwork that I no longer need. 
• Garage clean out.  We get a styrofoam cooler each time we have insulin delivered to the house, so we have approximately 758 coolers and we don't actually have a need for these-- at least not all of them.  I'm going to take my Popa's advice and take some to Goodwill.  Now that I have free time, I can do that this week!  Noah and my mother-in-law were regularly going to the recycling place in a nearby city and they'd take some cardboard boxes with them, but they stopped going during the winter.  Now that I'm off, I can make a couple trips with Noah and get our cardboard box collection under control again.  We have a shelf unit in the garage and it's kind of full of things we don't need/use.  Aaron and I need to take a weekend and really sort through it.  That'll probably happen in the next couple weeks now that Upwards will be over and he won't be spending half his Saturdays refereeing soccer games. 
• Shrubbery outside of the house.  Avery had this tea tree or something outside of her window and it got out of control and was soon taller than the house and would scratch her window like Nightmare on Elm Street-- not that I would really know, but it sounded creepy nonetheless.  Aaron cut back the tree a couple weekends ago.  We have plans to trim back or tear out most of the bushes in front of the house and replace them with gravel and some smaller flowering bushes. 
• Deck stairs and pressure washing.  One set of our deck stairs was built right up against the side of the house, which doesn't allow rain water to drain well, so it stays on the cinder blocks and looks dingy.  We can borrow my father-in-law's pressure washer and clean off that area, and when we redo the deck boards that need fixing, we'll replace the stairs and leave about an inch of space between the stairs and the house. 
• Roof.  Our house is 19 years old, so it's nearly due time for a roof.  It seems about half of the houses in our neighborhood have been roofed in the past year, so we have plenty of neighbors to get recommendations from!
• Shop clean out. We have a barn/shop/storage building in our backyard and I have lots of photography things left in there that I need to tackle this summer and organize. 
• Linen closet clean out-- also known as diabetes supply closet.  I need to organize all of the supplies and arrange them in order of expiration date. 
• Master closet clean out.  Did anyone else save every wedding and anniversary card?  No?  Just me then?  That being said, I need to clean out the closet and examine if I actually need to save everything.  
• Boys closet clean out. (Their closet is full of bins of clothes they've outgrown.  Some of these we will give to Aaron's stepsister and her baby boy when they visit this summer.  Others we'll probably end up just donating.  I've been holding onto stuff to consign, but it just becomes too much and I don't like clutter). 
• Avery closet clean out.  See a theme? (Her closet is full of clothes that one day she'll fit into, and clothes she's outgrown.  Some of these we'll send to a cousin in Washington who just had a baby girl, and some we'll consign, and some I just need to donate). 
• Bathroom reno.  We're deciding how long we'll be in this home.  Eventually, we'd like to buy 15+ acres and build a home, but we know we're not there yet.  We don't plan to look for land until I get my tenure from teaching, which will be three years in the same district. So until then, we're trying to make our home comfortable for us while we're here.  We've had plans to reno our bathroom since before we got pregnant with Avery.  We'd like to convert our tub into a tiled shower and take out our shower-insert and install floating wood shelves instead. I don't think this is something we'll do this summer, but I figured I'd write it down anyway. 
• Paint kitchen areas.  Yes, I still have two upper corners of my kitchen (and behind my fridge) that are not painted. This frustrates me so much.  I just need to take care of this. 

Whew!  I'm happy to challenge myself this summer and try to get most of these things done!  

Until Next Time, 

Much Love, Reba