2011 Home Goals

Remember The Nester? She's the blogger who hosted the fabulous holiday home tour a few weeks ago. Well now she's hosting a new tour - a tour of Home Goals 2011. I have a few goals in mind this year, so I am throwing my hat in the ring again! Seeing as we are limited in budget and time, I'm trying to keep things realistic here.

One of my first goals is to reduce the paper clutter that seems to multiply in my house. It starts with the mail - the mail that overwhelms me. So everyday I pull out the bills and random insurance papers and then throw the magazines/ads/catalogs/etc. into one of my little multi-purpose bins. It doesn't take long for the poor bin to become filled to capacity.
So while I do recycle everything and anything I can from the bin about once a week, I decided to take my de-cluttering a bit further. I've started contacting companies of several catalogs I receive and I have asked to be removed from their mailing lists. I don't catalog shop. I shop in stores, I shop online, but not from catalogs. So far all the companies I've contacted have responded that they will remove me - one even telling me they were glad I was making the decision to go green. I'll continue to contact companies as the catalogs come in and hopefully I'll be able to reduce a lot of the paper that comes into my house.

Another home goal is to update our guest bath - which is currently this lovely shade of old-lady rose.
We've already replaced some of the tacky gold fixtures with silver, but still have a few more updates to make. The big change is going to be the color. It took us a while but we picked a nice seafoam green from Home Depot and all we need to do is a coat of Kilz and one to two coats of the green to get rid of the dusty rose.
Other changes I hope to facilitate in the house are:

• Cleaning out the spare room (which will become Noah's nursery)
• Transforming Ish's room to a "big boy" room
• Organizing the office - it's about 1/2 way there now

Hopefully we can pay down some debt and put some money aside for bigger projects in 2012 - a new fence, updating our awful master bath and new decks off the kitchen and family room. But for now, I'll be happy once that awful rose colored bathroom is gone!!