Are you a starter or a finisher?

This post could sound like I'm referring to lots of different things, like sports or working at a machine shop. Really I'm just asking generally about your work style.

I have discovered that I'm definitely, no holds barred, a starter. I LOVE starting new projects. I've had to suppress many urges to start new projects this summer. But I just kept asking myself, "When? When will you have time to work on that?" You already have about 5 projects going that you started last year."

Seriously, I have something in every room of my house. In my office that I'm sitting in right now, I had a plan to make DIY magazine files thinking it'd be cheaper than buying them. I found a super cute post on pinterest of some that can be made with plywood ad 1x4s and I went straight to Home Depot and bought the materials. Unfortunately, I am deathly afraid of operating the miter saw on my own, so I'm waiting for a time when my husband has time to help me and can give me a tutorial on how to operate his power tool before I can actually embark on that project. I have the 4'x8' piece of plywood propped up against our shelves in the garage,

just waiting for us to have time, and inclination, to get to it. 

In my living room I have a new set of window blinds that I was sure would brighten up the room (and function properly) that are waiting to be hung. They've been sitting in another corner of the garage for at least a year.

My kitchen is the piece de resistance. I started a major project in the kitchen last summer and I am still working on it. It was a very involved process but anyone with even a small bit of resolve and sticktuitiveness would've been finished about 9 months ago. I decided to update the kitchen cabinets by deglossing them, priming, them, painting them and covering with a coat of polyurethane. I finished about 75% of the project and then forgot about it. I even felt bad about it for a little while. Like when my sister came to visit at Thanksgiving. I thought she'd make fun of me for having all the doors pulled off of my cupboards so I finished as many as I could before she arrived. I even spent almost every day she was at my house painting or priming a door or two just to show her that it was a work in progress.  But then she left. And I packed up my doors and the table I was painting them on and put them away for another time. They've been that way since last Thanksgiving. They are now sitting on a table in my garage, which we've recently cleaned, and it's a lot more fun to be in there,

but those doors are still just waiting for me to get around to finish painting them so they can be hung back up. They've been off for so long now though, that I don't even think it looks bad anymore to have open cupboards with all the contents of the pantry and the spice cupboard hanging out for everyone to see.

I actually find it rather convenient that I can pull out the cereal or the 50 lb bag of rice 

from the pantry without even having to open the door. Talk about a time saver! I wasn't even embarrassed when my parents came to visit in July. I was like, "ah well, they've seen them that way before when they came in March. They'll be used to it." I seriously don't know what it'll take to get me to finish that project. Someone posted on facebook the other day to "Do the thing you don't want to do" and that phrase has stuck with me. My only problem is that there are at least 5 major things that I don't want to do around my house. I don't even know where to start anymore and that's the thing I usually excel at, but I think it's only when it's a brand-new kind of fresh start.

My bedroom has a ceiling and a set of closet doors that both need to be painted.

There are also a few places where we need to hang more base moulding. See below.

We did a complete overhaul of our master bedroom last year, extending into the bedroom next to ours to make room for a walk-in closet and a master bathroom. We hung sheet rock and primed and painted all the new walls. The only thing left is that the ceiling needs another coat of paint. We started it using a spray gun that I found on sale at Home Depot for $50 and the finish on the ceiling looked pretty good when we painted it in the evening light, so we patted ourselves on our backs and moved all the furniture back into our room. It wasn't until I woke up one morning and saw the ceiling in the natural light of the morning sun that I noticed what a splotchy job we'd done with the spray gun. Now I wake up every morning it's light in my bedroom, looking up at the ceiling and thinking about how it still needs another coat of paint. 

The master bathroom looks really nice. It's pretty much finished but we left our mirrors hanging slightly askew from one another, 

Seriously, they are hanging about 1/4" off from each other. And we have just one more little towel rod that is waiting to be hung, BUT when you're in there, you can't even really tell that anything's missing.

Our guest bathroom, however, needs to be recaulked because last time we caulked, we let it dry without remembering to smooth it out in time and it bunched up and got gloppy and uneven. I know some of these are little things, and people say "don't sweat the small stuff" and all that, but I'm trying to change our bad habits, so I'm looking carefully at everything we've almost finished. Also I'm a noticer. I notice all the little lines and details and it bothers me when I see things like dirt on the baseboards, or uneven caulk, or an uneven layer of paint on the ceiling. Some of my kids are noticers too but, unfortunately -- or fortunately depending on how you look at it-- my husband is not a noticer. Trust me, I really appreciate this quality of his on days when I'm busy or out playing and don't have time to clean the house. It doesn't bother him at all when the sink is full of dishes or the living looks like a whirlwind blew down our street dumping all the kids' toys, shoes, backpacks, books etc. right in our front room! I really like that about him.

The hallway wall still needs a coat of paint over the newly hung and textured sheet rock.

that we put up where the old bedroom door used to be. 

I started staining the stair rails with Java Gel Stain that I ordered online. I got one of the newel posts finished, see?

But I still need to paint all of the spindles. The downstairs family room also needs some more moulding hung and painted and it could really use some curtains to go in the window.

My son's closet needs a door. 

The downstairs bathroom needs to be repainted because we painted the entire room before we applied grout to the shower wall tile. That was premature, evidently, because we smeared grout everywhere in the very last step of the process and it got all over the newly painted bathroom walls. Ugh, I am so dreading having to repaint a wall 

that I only just recently painted. 

My laundry room needs the light repaired;

it's literally hanging by a thread.

I think that about covers all of the projects we've STARTED inside our house. The exterior of our house would require its own really long post. And I keep having to stop myself from starting new projects. Like I have this idea of using textured spray paint on our windowsills to make them look marbleized and opulent. And I caught myself almost convincing my husband to buy tiles to hang for a new back splash in the kitchen. 

No Barb, you don't need it. You don't even have time to get to it now. It's okay. Drive past Home Depot. You have enough supplies at home to work on something you've already started. Finish something all the way before moving on to the next fun thing.