Meg vs. Myself: Weekly Goals

Time to report on the week!

April 2-7
Monday: Clear off our desk and clean our room. (This may be the scariest goal so far)

Tuesday: Clear a place to plant sunflowers and put a planter in the side yard. Re-fill the green waste bin!

Wednesday: Put up new smoke/CO detectors. Call to set up final house inspection.

Thursday: Clean out the gutter drain in the front yard. Pull weeds if there is still room in the can.

Friday: Change out the dimmer switch in the master bedroom. Cut up the rest of the branches and put in the shed for fire wood.

Saturday: Start refinishing bench - put on liquid sandpaper, go buy paint and hardware for drawers.


April 9-14  (Spring Break!)
Monday: Catch up on last week's projects. Catch up on sleep.

Tuesday: Buy paint for bedrooms. Paint a final coat on the bench.

Wednesday: Kindly ask hubby to put blinds back up in the living room. Pull out sheets and figure out a plan for curtains.

Thursday: Finish clearing out the side yard. Re-fill the green waste bin.

Friday: Start painting master bedroom.

Saturday: Finish painting master bedroom.

Meg vs. Refinishing: Painting the bench and a little relaxation.

Thursday: Clean out the gutter drain in the front yard. Pull weeds if there is still room in the can.

Friday: Change out the dimmer switch in the master bedroom. Cut up the rest of the branches and put in the shed for fire wood.

Saturday: Start refinishing bench - put on liquid sandpaper, go buy paint and hardware for drawers. 

Clearly it has been an off week. But for good reason! My in-laws are visiting (well, MIL got here yesterday, FIL will be here tomorrow). I didn't know they were coming when I planned my goals last week. So after doing more cleaning on Wednesday than I have done since we have lived here, I thought I could give myself a bit of a pass and take it easy. We've relaxed, gone to the Jelly Belly Factory, walked by the bay, and the hubs and I even went on a date (shopping for house stuff--we are hopeless romantics!). Still, some things have gotten done. The weed goal was easy because the can was already full, ha ha! I won't be too hung up if we don't finish all the goals this week because tomorrow we have awesome plans like going to the temple, eating out, dying Easter eggs, and doing some consulting with my Pops-in-law about future house projects. If I don't write until Sunday, I haven't been kidnapped, I've just been enjoying! And for your enjoyment, here are a couple of pictures from spray painting my bench today:

I decided to scratch my plans of painting the old fashioned was and just spray this bad boy all at once. Sometimes taking a shortcut is better than not doing it at all! Kind of a funny note - we noticed that all of the spray cans had pictures of Ikea furniture that they had spray painted. This can has a picture of our old dining room table painted white, and another can had our metal end table painted pink. I guess Rust-oleum doesn't have a very big budget for their cover art! Ha!

After a quick sanding.

After a whole can of primer (clearly I ran out).

After a whole can of paint.

I'll get another can next week so I can add another coat and finish off the parts I missed (the inside of the drawers, the underside of the tabletop, etc. But for not all the visible parts are somewhat presentable. When it is all dry tomorrow I'll take a picture with the pad back on. I am so excited!

Meg vs. Safety: Fire/Carbon Monoxide Detectors

Wednesday: Put up new smoke/CO detectors. Call to set up final house inspection.

It has been a busy day. I have been trying to clean our house--really clean it--and have done everything but the floors and the tubs. That is a lot for me (I usually don't even manage to do the dishes daily!). So when the plug on the smoke detector didn't fit the plug in the ceiling, I couldn't bear to go out and turn off the electricity and re-wire it just before bed time. And good thing I didn't, because the little one decided he didn't want his dinner anymore just as I was putting him in bed, and kindly returned it onto my shirt (and his own jammies). So I gave myself a pass on that one.

However, I did install two combination smoke/carbon monoxide detectors in the hallways, so I didn't completely neglect the goal. My current plan is to do the last one later this week when we also put in the new light switch, since both require wiring in the same room.

Now that my 2-hour bedtime fiasco is over, time to get those floors and tubs and GO TO BED!

Meg vs. The Back Yard: Weeding and more weeding

Tuesday: Clear a place to plant sunflowers and put a planter in the side yard. Re-fill the green waste bin!

Clear part of the side-yard. Check!

Fill up the bin. Check plus!

Un-cover an existing planter that sits exactly in the sunny area. Check Check! There are actually pavers and rocks surrounding the planter, but you wouldn't know it by looking.

Verify that someone actually grew something here aside from weeds once. Checkity-check!  (It was rosemary - only a step above a weed, but I'll take it.)

Clean up the milk spills, dish pile, and crushed animal cookies under the furniture because my awesome mother-in-law will be here in 2 days, followed by my wonderful father-in-law 2 days after that: I suppose I had better get to that.

Meg vs. The Clutter: Cleaning My Room

Monday: Clear off our desk and clean our room.

You wouldn't think this would be an all-day task. That is, you wouldn't think it until you saw our desk:

The rest of the room wasn't much better, but I'll spare you that. Our room doubles as our office, and our desk is the catch-all for everything in the house. It usually works like this: I put things I need to get done on the desk. The boys bring in random things from around the house. John studies and things collect. I try to clean through the stack, and sort things onto the bed, like I did today:

On a normal day, John gets home or it gets late, and all of the piles get unceremoniously dumped back onto the exact same spot on the desk, resulting in a mess only slightly better than it was previously, and a lot of frustration on my part. The difference is that today I actually made sure to finish before that could happen. It really was an all-day event, because it included sorting through papers, finishing tasks, filing, cleaning, fixing, and shredding copious amounts of documents we had accumulated before we got this bad boy from a generous person on FreeCycle.

During the times when my kids could no longer tolerate my negligence, we went in the back yard and started a compost bin with scraps from last week and all the shredded paper from today. I also filled up a good portion of the green waste bin while they played, so I actually got ahead!

The hubby knew I was going to clean our room today, but even so he seemed kind of shocked when he came home to this:

That alone makes the effort worth it (although an ice cream sundae after dinner didn't hurt either).

Meg vs. Myself: Weekly Goals

Time to report!

March 25-31
Monday: Re-fill up the green waste bin.  (Read Mockingjay. Heehee.)

Tuesday: Put up new ceiling fan in master bedroom.

Wednesday: Re-install blinds in the baby room. Shorten the blinds in all the bedrooms.

Thursday: Get paint samples for bedrooms and bathrooms. Scrape damaged paint from living room windows, then prime and paint.

Friday: Organize garage shelves.

Saturday: Plant melon seeds in grow trays with the boys. Watch General Conference!


And next week:

April 2-7
Monday: Clear off our desk and clean our room. (This may be the scariest goal so far)

Tuesday: Clear a place to plant sunflowers and put a planter in the side yard. Re-fill the green waste bin!

Wednesday: Put up new smoke/CO detectors. Call to set up final house inspection.

Thursday: Clean out the gutter drain in the front yard. Pull weeds if there is still room in the can.

Friday: Change out the dimmer switch in the master bedroom. Cut up the rest of the branches and put in the shed for fire wood.

Saturday: Start refinishing bench - put on liquid sandpaper, go buy paint and hardware for drawers.

Friday: Organize shelves in the garage.

I did work on this, but not to the extent I was planning. I didn't have full access to the shelves, mostly because of this recent acquisition:

I am sure my father-in-law will be proud to know we got this sturdy wood dresser for free, and plan to re-do it. (Why do I keep giving myself more projects?!).

Here is what I did get done:

Food storage all together on one shelf.

Paint on two shelves by the work bench.

 Car stuff all on the shelf closest to the garage door.

I know, you are so impressed it has rendered you speechless. I am pretty impressed with myself, too =).