I hope everyone had a safe, stress-free holiday season with family and friends.  As for me and mine it was fabulous.  I had a great Thanksgiving with my family, had family portraits taken the following week (and they turned out amazing), had Christmas dinner with my book club the next week, my annual “Girlfriends Dinner Party” the week after that, then finished up with Christmas Sunday brunch with my family the weekend before Christmas.  Christmas was just Stan, Babydoll, and I and the same went for New Years.  It’s something that we really enjoy, because it gives us the opportunity to do not much at all.  Of course I cook, but we don’t have to worry about someone coming over or having to be somewhere.   With all of the cooking and baking and cooking and baking and cooking and baking that I’ve done, I really need the break on the actual holidays. 

And to top it all off, we have finished with the basement.  When I say finished, I mean that we have done everything that was deemed necessary.  We still need to add the bar area,  but that is something that we have decided to think about a little more because it will have to be something custom due to space.  We have furniture (that has a story that I will tell later) and now Stan truly spends all of his free time down there.  He really is happy with the finished look.  I am too, but I’m able to play it a little cooler than him. 

Looking back over 2013, I think back on the projects that we worked on this year.  The basement was something that took a lot of our time.  It was basically a year long project, but we also had some backyard work done.  We spent well over a three weeks having a  the grass removed, having electrical installed and then laying out sod, rocks, and lights to make the backyard more polished. 

I will post tons of pictures and chronicle the process at a later time in a longer, picture-filled post.

This year I will be getting my long awaited kitchen remodel.  (sigh)  The thing with this remodel is that I need to have my budget very precise.  I will not be able to space it out like we did the basement.  I don’t want to spend months without a kitchen, my goal is to have a completed kitchen in three weeks.  Don’t laugh that’s my goal and I’m sticking to it.

Do you have any major home remodeling projects for this year?