It's a New Year!

It's a new year! 2013! I'm very excited for the new year...no particular reason, I just love the fresh new feeling of the new year. It's like the year is a piece of paper that you doodle and write all over during the year and you get a new piece at the beginning of the next year...all fresh, crisp, and bright, ready for you to start doodling on again.

I use to never make resolutions and when I did it was usually something ridiculously hard that I'd usually break it within the first week! For example, at midnight one year, I resolved to give up fast food and then two hours later I found myself chowing down on a double cheeseburger from McDonald's...wow...I made it two hours! I split my new year's resolutions into two lists: Personal and Home Improvement. They are mostly just projects that I need to get done, but I thought if I make a goal of getting them done in a year and blogged about it I could hold myself more accountable for getting them done. We'll see...

Personal Resolutions for 2013

Go through my pile of old cookbook, food magazines,  Country Livings, and Better Homes and Gardens. I have quite a collection and I need to go through them and decide what recipes and articles I want to keep and recycle the rest. Once I've rip out what I want, I need to sort and file them and then hopefully place the recipes into my big cookbook...

 I  need do something with all the wedding cards we received. I was thinking about doing something similar to something turquoise's blog. It's so cute and so much better than putting them in a box that will never seeing the light of day. Whatever I end up doing will be a million times better than sitting in the birdcage we used for the wedding on my craft room floor.

I recently ordered and received my wedding pictures. I ordered about 450 pictures all together. Gasp! That's a lot of pictures! Most are duplicates that will go to my parents and in-laws as well as the bridal party. I now have the goal to get them all separated into who gets what and then put mine in chronological order and put them into my wedding album. I also want to make a scrapbook of our wedding. I started a scrapbook of ideas while planning the wedding and I think I want to build off that one...I want to have all the idea pages first followed by what they became for the wedding. 

I want to have a yard sale this spring or summer. We have accumulated so much stuff over the past few years and received many replacement items as wedding presents. It is time to let the old go. Our attic is starting to fill up and I'm not a fan of that! I want to get all the clutter out of our house and out of our lives!
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My last and most personal goal is to lose weight. Ugh! I hate my struggle with weight. I love to eat and I'd love to be skinnier...talk about a daily struggle. I lost 40 lbs about a year or so ago and since then I've started to put it back on. I'm nowhere near as heavy as I was but my pants are tight when they were loose just a few months ago...It makes me sick thinking about regaining the weight. So, the hubby and I are back on the diet. It's only day two but I feel better knowing I'm back to making good decisions with food. I'm back at the gym again and weaning myself off caffeine. Since I'm at home it is so easy to go grab a handful of chips or a few cookies every time I pass through the kitchen, so I'm giving myself more projects to keep myself busy and away from the kitchen. I also went through my cupboards and fridge and threw out any open "bad" food and donated any unopened food to a local food pantry. I've meal planned our dinners for the next week and a half so there will be no temptation to order a pizza or Chinese. Wish me luck!

Home Improvement Resolutions for 2013

Replace the totally 90's light fixture in the foyer. It does not go at all with our 1915 house...It's so hideous, I'm almost too embarrassed to turn it on!

I'm not feeling the color of our Dining Room...I like red but this color just rubs me the wrong way...the more I look at it the more I hate it...I'm kinda starting to lean toward a grey color to go with our chairs but I think I need to go paint shopping to choose a few to sample.

 The Mud Room/Laundry Room....the blue is about as gross as the plaid wallpaper...We eventually want to take down the wall between this room and the kitchen to expand the kitchen and move the laundry down to the basement so I'm thinking of just painting over the wallpaper and existing paint so I can live with it for now.

These walls are so bare! I want to frame up some of our wedding pictures and  family pictures to fill up walls so it looks like someone lives in our house!

This is my walk-through closet and I really want to find some really awesome wallpaper to replace the dated 1950's wallpaper that is falling off the wall!

Bad picture, I know, but I want to make some curtains for my Craft Room. I think it'll make the room feel a little more put together even though I don't have a desk yet...maybe that should be a goal, to get a desk...

Well, there it is! My 2013 New Year's Resolutions! I'm hoping to get them all taken care of! I really have faith that I will! I hope you all have good luck achieving your resolutions in the new year and HAPPY NEW YEAR!