Making Our House a Home

ü  Paint door

ü  Install new light fixtures in rec room

ü  Put blinds up in office

ü  Paint bathroom

Everyone has made one or seen one.. the Honey-Do list. The Honey-Do list is a list of all those tasks you need to do around the house that sucks up ALL of your free time. Mike and I had a party at our house this past weekend for some of our family. As we took them through the house saying things like “We are going to do this here” and “We want to do this there”, etc… I realized just how big our honey-do list was. So today, we put it on paper,  3 pages and 63 individual items later, we have our list.

Writing the list, that’s the easy part. Now what? You need to ask the question, what do you want to do and have time to complete first.

You can’t dive into the list just yet.

How are you going to pay for all of this? It becomes a discussion of moneybe cause you know as well as I do, there is never an endless supply of money to complete all these projects! And trust me, there is almost ALWAYS some hidden costs in every project you do.

Next, assign a cost of materials to each item on the list.

For instance, to go back to my list above:

Paint door – Scraper and varsol to remove existing paint ($4.79), Drop cloth ($6.49), Painters tape to tape off door knob ($3.99), Sand paper ($6.49), Primer & Paint ($24.97) + Tax

Total cost - $52.80

Who would have thought… I just want to put one of those nice red doors on my house and its going to cost me $52.80! But you can look at it this way; what would it cost you to buy the door already red and get it installed? Doors start at $200 and go up from there.

Just remember, when you are choosing to do projects, you should have a contingency fund in case something goes wrong. Mike and I aren’t the most handy couple in the world, and yes…duct tape is in our tool box. In my own opinion is a good rule of thumb is to keep a contingency fund of 25% of the project budget for unforeseen costs and well…errors J.

So for this project I would make sure I have the $52.80 in actual material costs plus an additional $13.20 (25%) for a total $66 in cash saved before we even think about starting anything.

Finally, when making your list, try and break down each room into small projects that are attainable. Trust me you don’t want half started projects started all over your house because they become more than you can handle in the time you had available.

Best of luck! We will keep you updated on our projects…in the fight to make our house, our home.