2025 Year-In-Review

Last year was such a mixed bag of personal challenges, slow shifts, and hard decisions that it’s difficult to encapsulate! House progress was slow, and largely consisted or triaging things that were broken or making smart swaps to improve our lives. Though I can finally say the library is in the home-stretch! …And I still need to tackle the attic.

Personally, it’s hard to quantify the struggles we had this year in our household, but I will say that a lot of my close relationships grew in ways I never could have imagined: it’s enough to thank the past year for that time. Our household after five long, hard years is back to being a two-dog family. We adopted Henry just before his first birthday! He’s black lab, doberman mix: all legs. Perfect for getting me back into running and mixing us all up a little.

Travel

Last summer, I had a handful of opportunities to travel. My oldest and I went westward as far as Devil’s Tower with a lot of time in South Dakota visiting the Black Hills and the Badlands. It was an incredible trip! Just what we needed for a midsummer mental break. We also took the kids to Northern Minnesota, visiting Split Rock State Park with extended family. It was a beautiful trip along Lake Superior’s North Shore.

The Basement

I plugged along quite a bit in the basement library, and finally finished the ceilings. The removable soffits already came in handy when a kid flooded the bathroom. The glass block windows seal the basement much better than the previous hopper windows. Without much attic progress, the basement is a nice, warm cocoon this winter!

I am a lot further in planning to close in the office this year, but I have a few structural problems I need to address first: we have a cracked joist that has some inadequate fixes from owners-past that I want to secure properly. My hope is to also lift the joist a bit and fix some of the sagging in the dining room. It’s a tender job, but it’s definitely a top priority.

Upgrades

We made quite a few upgrades to our backyard last year, and we definitely want to expand on those this year! I considered them side quests before working on the attic, but it really was the bulk of the work here last autumn. The biggest changes are the paver patio and the loss of our elm tree with subsequent addition of our greenhouse.

In the backyard also we landed on a few major upgrades to our stocktank pool: we redid the filtration with through-wall filtration, and we got a new cover. While I liked the rolling cover we made in 2024, it was cumbersome to remove and reinstall. It also sagged in the middle once water was displaced and wasn’t suitable for winter. So we budgeted for a Cowboy Pools inflatable hard cover. During the swimming season, it was delightful! And as long as we keep the snow from accumulating on its top, it’s holding up well to winter as well.

We did a functional upgrade to both our front and back entries too. Our front door added a storm door; its full light glass with swap-in screen lets plenty of light through our three-lite front door, and it provides an additional thermal barrier in the entry. Our living room is noticeably warmer with the storm, and we painted it a bright purple. It’s the perfect accent for our porch!

The back door somewhat reverted in use to what we used when we moved in. Our back entry doesn’t have a lot of space to protrude from the wall without impinging on opening our basement door. So, when we redid our kitchen in 2019, we eliminated the shoe cabinet at the backdoor opting for hooks only instead. With our growing kids, we realized how much a little more closed storage helps at the back door. And when I acquired an Eastlake mirror this summer, I knew I wanted to incorporate one somewhere. So, I stained an Ikea Stall shoe cabinet for some slim storage, added the mirror, and rearranged our hooks. Sometimes the small things make the biggest impact on day-to-day experiences.