Spring break is quickly approaching, and I can’t wait for it. While I love school, I’m very excited to get some projects around the house completed. In addition to the house, I have two school related projects to work on throughout the week. One is my senior design which I’m very excited about. It’s a bicycle collision avoidance system, and that’s all I can really say about it. It makes me excited, and it reminds me why I chose engineering. There’s just so many doors open to you once you complete your degree, and I highly recommend taking as many math classes while in high school.

The second project is learning SolidWorks. I created several projects that relate to the house to try and design in Solid Works which is a 3-D designing software used in a lot of engineer designing applications. So I’ll be sharing those as we get to those side projects with the house. Depending how those go, I may continue to design some things in the program as a nice way to combine my engineering and the house.

Now, unrelated to school, I have several big projects that involve the house, and some are very important to me to complete before we do our open house in May (squeal!).

First, I really want to get the upstairs cleaned up (like the library). Right now we have to pick and choose which projects we do until I complete my degree, so I really want to focus on the downstairs and the outside. So for now, the upstairs I just really want to get organized.

Second, I want to finish painting the bedroom. Right now we need to paint the last wall which is shown here, because we ran out of paint. We also purchased white paint to paint the trim in there as well as the ceiling which has varying colors currently. Steve wants to finish the drywall in the closet which I will post pictures of once we start. I’d also like to build and install the trim around the closet and main door for the bedroom. Because these the door was moved and the walk-in closet was built by the previous owners, they don’t have the trim around them. Also, the room doesn’t have the baseboards that are consistent throughout the house. While I’m not sure we’ll get to that during this spring break, I’d like to do the crown molding.

Lastly, the outside is a huge eye sore right now. There are a few plants out front which can be seen here:

I really want to clean up the stones that are used there, and I have some ideas for the plants that are there now. We also put up a fence shortly after this photo was taken, so it’s not the most recent. I want to move the fence back and paint it. This will give me some additional “front yard” in which to plant flowers and add curb appeal. We also don’t have a gate at the front yard, and this makes it difficult for guests to get to the yard when they come to visit. Since we plan to have lots of outdoor parties and entertaining, this is at the top of the list to fix.

So while it sounds overwhelming, we’re going to start this weekend prepping in between studying for finals, and we’re going to start spring cleaning. I’m off to get started!