Listy

I am a girl who thrives on lists. I love to make them, I love to read them, and I LOVE to cross things off of them.

You may remember the extreme list I made for the days before my marathon.

Or the list of food in our fridge that needed to be eaten before we went on vacation.

I also have standardized packing lists for vacations. I create separate lists for me & Katie to make sure we don't forget anything when we travel. I save the lists on our computer so I have a good starting point for the next trip. (nerd!)

Last Sunday, Kate and I decided to tackle a few projects around the house. But first, you guessed it, we made a list of everything we'd like to accomplish. For this, I pulled out our large dry erase board.

I split the list into 3 categories: House-Large (ex: new dishwasher), House-Small (ex: clean out fridge), and Other (ex: mail package to Katie's cousin who is serving in the military overseas).

Humorously (or scarily) "Plan a Wedding" landed at the bottom of the "Other" column.

Once we filled the board with tasks, we decided which we could start and finish that day. First up was organizing the pantry.

Kate installed a wire drawer to one of the shelves for easy access to snack foods. It's especially convenient for food that comes in bags, like chips, pretzels, and dried fruit.

And we rearranged things so the not-as-often used stuff went in the harder to reach places.

We also packed up a bunch of glass jars that have been collecting on the kitchen counter. I'm saving glass jars of all sizes to be used as wedding decorations. Not exactly sure how yet, but I'm sure we'll come up with something.

When we decided to get out of the house for a little bit, we made a list of all the things we needed from the hardware store. We came back with a new trash can, daylight bulbs for the kitchen (yay!), a new furnace filter, the pieces for a homemade light box (I promise to share!), new pots for our house plants, and a new ceiling fan/light for the living room.

Throughout the week, we kept working on things from the list, and were able to cross off quite a few!

However, I may have gotten a little "cross-off happy". You see, I crossed off light/fan for the living room after we purchased the fan on Sunday. The fact that our living room still ceiling looked like this on Saturday...

...has me feeling like I jumped the gun a little bit on that one. However, yesterday we got down to business and got that sucker up. But first I had a few words with the so called "5 Minute Fan".

This was my first time do anything electrical, so I was a little intimidated.

However, I wanted to learn, so I did a bit of everything. I tried to make sure I understood every step so I'd feel confident the next time we do something like this.

I was also the official stripper...WIRE stripper, that is! (ha, ha) Look at this fine handiwork.

And after about (5 minutes)^3, our 5 minute fan was installed and working.Ta-Da!

I feel so spoiled to have an overhead light that actually illuminates the entire room! Seriously, the lighting in our house is SO dim. Next weekend will be the dining room (hopefully!)

Still high on the glory of DIY accomplishment, we also decided to tackle re-caulking our tub. Kate had spent hours prepping it while I was at work (removing 2 layers of old caulk and killing all of the mildew with bleach), so I definitely wanted to lend a hand. And honestly, I didn't think it'd be too difficult.

Turns out, the how-to YouTube video we used was totally deceiving. The gaps we were trying to fill were quite large. And it's really not that easy to get a smooth, even line.

After WAY too much time together in the bathroom, some strong words aimed at inanimate objects, and far too many fumes from the mineral spirits, we were finally finished. We immediately ran to our new beer fridge...

...and treated ourselves to some cold ones.

But the fun didn't end there. Oh, no. Katie took apart and packed up our old fan for donation, while I built my light box!

I still need to get some fabric or paper for the inside, and once I do I'll show you how I made it and how the pictures look!

Are you a list-maker, like me? Do they make you more efficient?