Can you believe another year has zoomed by?! It’s been a pretty good year for us, I mean, not so much when it comes to the DIY / Renovation – but this year we welcomed baby Dylan into the world and have had 11 crazy months watching him grow instead! He’s now crawling, trying very hard to walk, and enjoys getting into everything and anything (mostly things he shouldn’t be getting himself into) and basically, causing lots of havoc!
But with 2022 on the horizon, we’re planning for the next 12 months ahead and it’s time for us to share our renovation and DIY goals! We don’t have a huge amount planned and to be honest, most of this list are things we didn’t get done this year but anyway, here’s what we’d like to achieve in 2022:
Making a DIY Room in the Basement
We’ve done a fair amount of renovation work on the basement over the last couple of years, but currently, none of the rooms are finished or properly furnished. Money has been really tight for us in the last 12 months and we’ve had to take a step back from doing work down here, especially after the price of materials spiraled in 2021.
However, in the next year, we’d really like to focus our money specifically on the DIY room in the basement, which is currently empty and unused. We plan to paint the walls and build a workbench so we have space to DIY more easily, rather than trying to make do with limited floor space all the time. Having said that, this room is still very small, so it’s not perfect, but I think we can make it work!
Adding Beds at the Allotment
Last year we bought a fair amount of cheap tantalized timber from eBay and Facebook marketplace. The majority of this timber was either completely unused (seller had perhaps bought too much) or were good-sized offcuts leftover from projects. We spent just £11 in total and probably bagged ourselves over £100 worth of timber. That seems ridiculous, but have you SEEN the price of wood lately?
Anyway, we’ve already got the timber for this project, but unfortunately, we hadn’t managed to do anything with it. In the next year, we plan to use this wood to build some beds at the allotment – we just need some good weather to get on with it, so this is probably a job for the springtime. But definitely an achievable goal!
Finishing Odd Jobs Around the House
This one’s a bit vague, but we really want to start finishing a fair amount of odd jobs around the house. That means attaching that random bit of skirting, finishing that last bit of plastering, and yes, within this, we’d really like to finally build some alcove units for the living room which has probably been on our yearly to-do list for the last 2 years! Again, this is money/price-dependant though.
There are so many little jobs within our odd job list, I’d be here all day mentioning them, but the general plan is to not start any new ‘big’ projects this year and instead tackle those that we’ve left unfinished. Example of our very unfinished lounge below:
Clearing out the Attic
And finally, our last goal for 2022! It’s one that I’ve done so many times and yet somehow, the attic always fills up again.
For a long time, the attic has been used as storage for tools and materials which we’ve been slowly working our way through using over the years. But now, it’s also got a ton of baby storage up there too – which seems to just keep growing!
Eventually, we’d like to turn the attic into a bedroom with some storage in the eaves, but there’s not even electricity up there – so it needs A LOT of work first! We can’t do any work though until the space is empty. We’ve already moved all our tools out of here earlier in the year, we just need to now clear out the rest.
Unfortunately, this will probably mean using half our bedroom to store all those baby bits, but that’s the renovation game for you – constantly moving things from one room to another! I should say that we don’t plan to actually start any work in the attic until the following year, this is purely going to be prep work for then.
And that’s it! Every year our list of goals gets smaller (and every year we have a whole lot less free time!!), but hopefully, this one is achievable and hopefully, the price of materials and those pesky bills stop rising! Otherwise, you probably aren’t going to see much action happening around here!
Anyways, a happy new year to you all! Let’s hope 2022 will be a good one.
No Comments