INSIDE
Fix up the laundry room. Formerly (and sometimes still) known as the back porch, it's the first thing people see when they walk into my house. It doesn't make a very good first impression. The closest thing I can compare it to is a garage--I don't have a garage, so the laundry room gets all the crap stacked in it that people usually put out in their garages. Except for my car. That's outside.
Organize the pantry. It's not really a pantry; it's a little closet in the kitchen. I have cereal and pasta and dog chewies and my breadmaker and paper towels and a hundred other things all jam-packed in there and I can't find anything. I'm not planning to go crazy and spend a hundred bucks on cute containers and chalkboard labels and all that, but I would like to straighten it up. Mainly so I don't buy another 6 cans of tuna thinking I don't have any and then find 23 cans of tuna already in there. (Y'all think I'm kidding, but I'm not.)
Finish the doors we glued back together. Remember when we took the sawed-in-half doors off the hinges and glued 'em back together again? Well, one of them still doesn't have a doorknob on it and three of them still aren't painted, and that was almost four years ago.
Figure out my bedroom and/or possibly move into another bedroom. The bedroom I'm in now has six doors and a window in it. One of those doors goes to the outside, which kinda freaks me out. There's almost no wall space, which makes arranging furniture in there a challenge. Also, the longest (widest?) wall in there is curved.
OUTSIDE
Finish the west wall of the house. This is the wall we started scraping on last May, and almost all of it is scraped and painted, except for a 15-foot-wide section where the paint is nearly impossible to remove. As soon as the weather gets nice, I'll be out there working on that. I also need to fix a couple of trim pieces over there and neaten up a patch of clapboards that someone nailed over a basement window. (Stupid.)
Finish the north wall of the house. That's the back of the house. I got a pretty good start on scraping it last fall, and I even put a big ole swatch of primer on it, but it's far from done. We still need to replace those clapboards that are on there all whopper-jawed where they patched in the old back door.
If I can get those two things done this year, I'll be happy. No small potatoes, that.
UPSIDE-DOWN
Overhaul the Room of Shame. The back bedroom (the one connected to the bathroom I just re-did) is an unmitigated disaster. For the entire time I've owned this house, I've tried to pretend it doesn't exist. I'm not sure what happened in there, but in addition to looking like a disaster I think it may have suffered an actual disaster. Maybe a flood. Or maybe the roof caved in. It's that bad. It needs a new ceiling, a new floor, and maybe even new walls. So of course, I'm thinking of moving my bedroom in there. Really.
So there it is. The 2013 To-Do List. At the end of this year we can look back on it and