Where did the year go?

Woah, my last post was already a year ago.  Where did that time go?  I've been ferociously putting what I can to paying down debts with the goal being paying them off. While I can't say I'm out of debt, I can say I've now paid off over $9,000.00!! still have a little bit to go before I start on my student loans but the payment I was working on was a minimum payment each month of like $300 ish.  Terrible but now it's gone! Forever!

As for the weight loss, I haven't lost much more but I maintained!!! That's awesome because I still haven't changed my diet habits much from my weight loss post, and I've been to the gym just as frequently. I haven't maintained this well in a long time, usually it goes up and down (mostly up).

Other than those things the year since I posted last has been great! I'll write a post at another time explaining why.

On another topic my house projects have been minimal which stays true to my budget paying off debt as fast as I can.  What I have done around the house has been either free or very low cost.

Thanks to help from my great family, I repainted my ceilings in my living room, and kitchen.  In my bathroom there used to be popcorn ceilings.  Every post that I saw on removing popcorn ceilings on Pinterest said it was going to be so easy! Wet it down, scrape it off, clean up the mess no big deal!

FALSE!!!!!!! I took a scraper to it and barely scraped anything off! I did NOT want to sweat for hours wearing out my arms to make very little progress.  So on to plan B.  Thanks to my carpenter dad, we mudded over the whole ceiling.  Now that sounds worse than it is but my bathroom is REALLY small.  We also fixed the crown molding in the bathroom.  Whomever installed it in the first place put it in upside-down....one of the many remodeling shot jobs the previous owners of the house did.

I also did some demo and uncovered a jewel!!! Ok so it's not a real jewel but it's super exciting anyway!

Would you just look at that!!!! Brick chimney! Why on earth would anyone cover that up with drywall? No clue honestly.  But I'm so excited about it! I first came across it by doing laundry.  What?? Laundry?? yep! so my basement is unfinished and down in my laundry room, there's remnants of a coal chimney that I assume was used originally to heat the house when it was built in the 20's.  However, the portion of the chimney in the basement is painted white.  My hope was not just that the chimney went all the way through the house but also that it wasn't painted white the whole way.  There was only one way to find out!  Take a hammer to some plaster! I had those gold bowls hanging on the chimney side originally so I took one off and knocked out a little portion under the bowl, that way if it wasn't brick, I could just hang the bowl back up and no one would know.  Luckily for me I saw brick!!! So I put the bowl back until I had more time.  I did it one side at a time in two different "bash" sessions.  Let me tell you nothing is better to help you get some stress out than some aggression therapy! I was able to get all my stress out in each session.

I think I've exposed as much as I'm going to.  I have that horizontal divide that acts as a chair rail type thing throughout the whole kitchen.  My plan (when it fits in the budget) is to paint the bottom half white and the top half a less "pukey" looking color.  Not sure what yet but I was thinking either greige (grey/beige) or beige on it's own.  I also need to seal the brick somehow so it looks wet all the time and not powdery like it does in the photo.  Oh and I will put some trim pieces around the rough edge of the drywall.

Stay tuned for more projects and a story about how my 2018 was a fantastic year!