2022 Year In Review – Addicted 2 Decorating®

Hello! Anyone out there? *tap, tap* Is this thing on? 😀

Matt and I had such a wonderful, relaxing time over this last week, and after our terrible, horrible, no good, very bad final two weeks of 2022 (if you missed that story, you can read about it here), we desperately needed last week to ourselves. I did absolutely no work on the house during this last week. I watched more movies than I can count, took a nap just about every single afternoon, and ate way more yummy food than I should have.

So after checking out completely for a whole week, I’m finally feeling rested, ready and excited to get this new year underway. I’m ready to get back to the home gym and get that room finished, and move on to finishing my studio. I’m ready to get some smaller projects done that have been hanging over my head for a while now. I’m ready to start taking the needed steps towards getting our addition started. It should be a fun year!

But before that, let’s take a look at what my goals were for 2022, and see how I did on those. Spoiler alert: I didn’t make very good progress on my goals for 2022. 😀

When I was reading back over my 2022 Master List of Home Goals, I thought to myself, “I could really just copy and paste this post and use it for my 2023 Master List of Home Goals.” It’s true. On my list of home goals for 2022 were to (1) finish the home gym, (2) finish the master bathroom, and (3) finish my studio. I also planned to do some outdoor projects, like some maintenance on our front porch area and finally getting that completely finished.

In the end, the only finished room I crossed off of the list by the end of 2022 was the master bathroom. But I’m not going to beat myself up about it. I did make progress during 2022, and that’s what matters. And not only did I make progress, but I finished one of the biggest room remodels I’ve taken on to date.

At the beginning of 2022, the master bathroom looked like this…

And as of December, the bathroom is completely finished and looks like this…

If you missed that final before and after post, you can see the whole thing here.

While the master bathroom was the only room/area I finished in 2022, it was a huge project, and I’m so proud of how it turned out. I’m also very proud of the fact that I used that room to stretch my DIY abilities and learn new things.

One of the biggest ways I challenged myself on that bathroom was by building the table-style vanities and the middle storage cabinet.

I’ve built tables and storage cabinets before, but I’ve always built them to be painted. That means that I can rely on loads of wood filler and caulk to make up for my lack of perfect building skills before painting them.

But 2022 was the first time in all of my years of DIYing that I removed that safety net, and built the items for one of the two main feature walls in the biggest and (probably) most expensive room in our house out of walnut. I used walnut lumber, turned walnut legs, and walnut veneer to create these pieces.

I was so intimidated by that project, but looking back on it, I’m so glad that I pushed myself to flex those new DIY muscles. I now feel totally comfortable working with expensive lumber, working with high quality wood veneer, and working without the safety nets of wood filler and caulk. (To be clear, I did use some wood filler, but not nearly so liberally as I generally would on a piece that is to be painted. But caulk was out of the question.)

If you missed those projects, you can find them here:

I had hoped to get a lot more accomplished on my C.O.P. (cleaning, organizing, purging) journey through our house in 2022. But while I didn’t get everything purged and organized that I had hoped, I did finish up those last remaining organizational projects in the kitchen.

I am happy to say that the organizing solutions that I put into place for our refrigerator have stuck. At the present, our refrigerator could use a little cleaning and tidying up, but for the most part, it has stayed pretty organized. I haven’t gone back to my previous open-and-shove method that resulted in our fridge looking like the pictures on the left below…

And I also organized my cabinet where I store my four skillets by building this very easy DIY vertical skillet organizer.

That has made it so much easier to reach into that cabinet and grab exactly what I need rather than having to pull out a whole stack of skillets to get the one I want.

And finally, I got the whole back wall of cabinets cleaned out and organized.

Some of these cabinets had missing shelves because I had taken them out the last time I painted the cabinets (back in 2017), and I think some of the shelves accidently were placed on my scrap pile that got loaded up and hauled off with the construction debris. So I finally cut new shelves, edge banded them with wood veneer edge banding, and got all of the cabinets on this wall organized and useful.

I’m the type of person who isn’t naturally organized and tidy, but once systems are put into place, I’m pretty good at sticking with them. So having my whole kitchen purged and organized now makes it so much more efficient and easier to use. I hope to continue putting these systems into place in 2023 and beyond until every area of our house has been purged and organized.

While 2022 seemed a bit slow in the home projects category, the biggest and most life-changing thing happened for us in 2022. We bought a wheelchair van.

And after 13 years of being homebound and never leaving the house, Matt finally decided that he wanted to venture out and join the outside world again. For the first time in 13 years, he ate at a restaurant, went to a move theater and watched a movie, went to a park, went to church, and did several other things that he hadn’t done on well over a decade of being homebound.

I still get a little choked up when I watch the videos I took of our first outing. Matt and I were both emotional about it, and he and I both cried as we went through the line to order our food at Rosa’s. I’m sure the people there were wondering what the heck was going on. 😀 You can read all about our first week with the wheelchair van here.

The final big thing that happened in 2022 was that Matt bought me an appointment with a landscape designer for my birthday. After meeting with him, walking our property, and sharing my vision and dreams, the designer came up with a beautiful plan and drawing for me. This thing looks like a work of art that should be framed and hung on the wall.

So that pretty much sums up 2022. It was a slow year overall, and I don’t feel like I ended the year with a whole lot of progress to show. But at least I got the master bathroom done, and that was a huge accomplishment.

I do hope that 2023 has a whole lot more variety, though. I need variety to keep myself interested and motivated.

Addicted 2 Decorating is where I share my DIY and decorating journey as I remodel and decorate the 1948 fixer upper that my husband, Matt, and I bought in 2013. Matt has M.S. and is unable to do physical work, so I do the majority of the work on the house by myself. You can learn more about me here.

I hope you’ll join me on my DIY and decorating journey! If you want to follow my projects and progress, you can subscribe below and have each new post delivered to your email inbox. That way you’ll never miss a thing!