Monthly project update

Well in February my goal was to finish as many of our ongoing house projects as possible. You know, those projects that you get to the 'good enough' stage then forget about. Except you never really forget about them, cause every time you take a bath you notice the streaky edges of the paint job you said good enough on and didn't go back and do the second coat... Or the taped plastic covering the join between the kitchen's old laminate and the new wood floor in the rest of the house... My list goes on and on, and if I think about it too hard, I get totally mired in all the stuff that needs to be finished! But enough rambling...

I keep my photos sorted by month for the current year, and after the year is over I combine all the monthly folders into one yearly folder so that the folders don't get too overwhelming. This month, whenever I sat down and felt like the to-do list was still very overwhelming, like I wasn't making any progress, I would look in my February 2011 picture folder and look at all the projects I made progress on or finished. It was so encouraging!

The baby pictures scattered in the monthly folders encourage me too!

I think I have been quite successful in making progress and getting things done this month. On the home reno/organizing/decorating front, I finished the bathroom trim and made serious progress on the livingroom/diningroom/hallway trim. I purchased enough trim to finish the doorways in the hallway, and more than enough for Little M's room. I purchased wood to start working on the trim on the windows and patio doors. I moved my desk from the nursery to the guest bedroom closet, making both spaces so much more functional!

On the garden front I got exciting mail -  my order of seed packets, and planned my seed starting & garden layout. I found an old shop light left in the garage by the old owners, and moved it to the sunporch to use as a seed starting light. And I restarted a pot of herbs on my kitchen windowsill that was looking rather sad and old, and started some new basil seeds in it.

On a personal front, we went across to the west side of the state to visit my husband's family and have a late first birthday celebration with them for Little M. At the last minute I knitted a toque (or, as my American friends and family say, a hat) for a good friend's son for his first birthday. We got new renters moved in to our rental house, and put it on the market. We even had someone go through and look at the place! Our carefully tightened down budget survived having no renters from late January through early February, and we were even still able to put a teensy little bit into our emergency fund. We aren't up to our 3 month goal, but we're slowly but surely getting there. Hopefully with our tax return we'll get it finished and can move on to retirement, college, and paying our house off early!!

I guess, when I look at all the things we accomplished and see such a great list, I can ignore the things I really meant to do but didn't... The manuscript that I promised would get submitted by the end of the month (really, I still have tonight!!)... The monthly chore list that I only finished one task off of... The sunporch that I keep meaning to finalize a new plumbing plan for... But I guess that's why there is next month! And luckily I have a lot of the prep work done on some of my outstanding 'to-do's', so hopefully next month I will manage to make even more progress :)

I'd love to proclaim a 'no-new-things-added' policy in regards to my to-do list, so that I get all those almost-done projects finished before starting (and not finishing!) new ones, but maybe for next month I'll stick with trying to limit new things as much as possible, or at least not adding 2 new things for every one old thing crossed off! :)  I may even put up a monthly goal list, like one I've been admiring by Kim of NewlyWoodwards.

Knitted present - finished!

This afternoon we are heading over to some friends for their son's first birthday party. Even though it is still very much winter here, with up to a foot of new snow forecast over the next few days, it is a pool party! They have a small pool that the little kids can play in inside, so Little M and the other little kiddos will be able to have fun splashing in the water. Hopefully I can manage to stay relatively dry! My husband has to work, but they live right outside of the town where he works so hopefully he will be able to drop in briefly.

Before we go I need to finish the hat I am knitting for their son's birthday... I should have started (and finished) it days ago, but its been busy here and I have been working on other projects. Now I'm trying to finish it while Little M alternates between stealing my balls of yarn and using me as her own personal jungle gym. Makes knitting hard!

Hopefully I will update this post later today with a completed picture... Hopefully!!

**UPDATE**
So I didn't get the hat finished in time for the party this afternoon, but this evening I finished it off. I'm meeting them again Tuesday for our weekly mama & baby walk, so I'll give it to them then :) Here's the final product! I think it turned out really nicely :)

Found: grow light for seed starting!

I mentioned recently that I had recently realized there was a shop light hanging in the garage. Here it is above one of the work benches:

I figured we don't really need it there, and definitely not right now, so I moved it onto the sunporch to use as a seed starting light this spring. I had to have some serious discussions with my husband about how our pepper plants (among others) will be much better this summer if they have the grow light on them over the next couple months. He doesn't like the artificial lights and didn't want them in the house, even on the sunporch.  He eventually agreed to have the grow light on the sunporch for the spring, as long as I had it against the inside wall so it wasn't overly visible from the main room... Of course, this means I will have to constantly shift plants from the grow light to the window, but whatever, sometimes you gotta be content with small steps :)

I shifted some things around, and used a bit of extra rope from my clothesline to lower the light from the ceiling, where I had screwed 2 hooks into the ceiling joists. I still need to lower it a bit more, or use more bins to raise the 'stand' level up so that the plants will be closer to the light.  Ignore all the extra boxes of xmas decorations, I need to figure out someplace else to put them - they were stacked up in that corner. I've got a timer that I will put on the light so that I can easily set it to be on at certain times of day. Hopefully this will seriously beef up my pepper plants this spring!

2011 seed starting schedule & garden planning

I've started seeds indoors for my veggie garden for the past 2 summers, but never made a schedule, I just would decide, hmm, seems like about time to start my seeds, and that would be it. I started them all at the same time regardless of what type of plant they were, and never thought much more of it than that. Last year I even had to restart all of my seeds since they accidentally froze on the sunporch (courtesy of our old leaky sliding glass doors).

Spring 2010 - Little M supervising me re-planting my seeds

This year, since I've been blogging and seeing everyone else talk about their seed starting schedule, I decided to give it a go. First I looked at when the last frost was last year, which was unusually late and hard - May 21st. At that point I had corn and beans just peeking above the ground, and the pile of towels I spread over the sprouts didn't do a very adequate job at keeping the sprouts frost-free. That frost also killed most of our orchard flowers, so we had a very spotty fruit crop last fall!

May 21 2010 - towels protecting sprouts from a late & hard frost

I did some looking at the calendar, and turns out I still have 13 weeks until what I will consider our last frost date, so I guess I still have a bit of time before I need to start planting. I sat down and looked over the seeds that I bought this year and those that I have leftover and saved from the past couple years. I was surprised at how many different types I have! I planned out my garden layout, although there are some herbs and flower mixes leftover from last year that I really want to grow somewhere - hopefully I can get some sort of garden set up by the chicken coop as I have mentioned previously, so that I can have a bit more space.

Planning for my 2011 garden!

Now that I know I have 13 weeks or more until I start planting my start outdoors, I can relax a couple weeks and wait until at least next month to start planting my first seed starts.  I may start my peppers and some flowers earlier than that though, because last weekend I was working on cutting some trim boards in the garage when I realized that past owners had left a shop light in there that would be a perfect seed starting light! Yippee!! Sometime in the next week I will wrestle it out of the garage and put it up on the sunporch somewhere, and maybe I'll even be able to find an old heating pad somewhere to keep under my plants so they stay nice and warm. I figure with that light, I will be able to grow things like peppers and some flowers to a bigger stage than I would without that extra light, which will be perfect since last year my peppers were pitifully small at the time when I would have planted them out. I say 'would have' since a little mouse got into the sunporch while we were gone for a couple days, and when I came back the peppers were just little snipped off stalks... darn rodents!