My Goals for 2022

A new year means new goals. Here are the six things that I’ve chosen to focus on in 2022:

Continue working on home maintenance and organization projects.

This is going on my list for a third year. Our youngest daughter graduates high school this year, and I want us to be completely caught up on house stuff, so we don’t start our empty-nester years playing catch up. Last year, we sold a bunch of stuff we no longer needed on Facebook, tackled some organization projects and painted. This year, we need to do more of the same. We have two cast iron sinks that need to be re-enameled, so I’ll be learning how to do that.

Organize our studio.

We’ve been in our workspace for 4.5 years, so it’s high time we get it organized, and turn it into a space that my husband and I enjoy working in. We’ve tried to organize it several times, but we still haven’t landed on the right solution. It’s a small space; we have a lot of stuff; and we’re usually too busy to slow down and deal with it. Being frugal types, we’ve mostly taken a make do/use-what-you’ve got organization approach up until this point. Now, it’s time to pause, and come up the right solution to each organization challenge we have – even if it means spending some money (cringe). I’ve been talking about making skirts for a couple of our work tables, since we moved in; so I’m finally going to do it this year. We’re about a month into the great studio rethink, and we’re making good progress. I’ll do a post, when we get everything sorted out.

Earn enough scholarships to cover our youngest daughter’s first year in college.

Our youngest daughter will be headed off to college in the fall, and we’re determined to cover the cost of her college education with scholarships – just like we did/are currently doing with her sister. The scholarship grind isn’t fun, but it can definitely pay off, if you put in the work. I’ll do a big post later this year to show you where we land. In the meantime, here’s the post where I track my oldest daughter’s college costs and scholarships, and here’s the post where I talk about why we aren’t paying for our kids’ college education.

Make some clothes for myself.

Everyone needs a fun goal; this is mine. I rarely find the time to sew things for myself, so this year I’m going to make myself several pieces of clothing. I want to build a wardrobe of one-of-a-kind pieces that showcase my personal style. I’ll be hand-dying fabric, incorporating vintage elements; and who knows what else. I’ve already made my first piece of clothing. I plan to share it soon.

Play with my fabric paints/fabric stamp pads.

Someone gave me a bunch of fabric paints and fabric stamp pads a few years ago, and I’ve been itching to create with them. This is the year I’m going to do it. I plan to sew up a bunch of napkins and kitchen towels out of my surplus of white fabric, so I can experiment. I may even incorporate some hand-painted/stamped fabrics in the clothes I sew for myself. The artist in me is itching to play, and I’m going to carve out the time to make it happen.

Find ways to simplify our lives and fix the things that drive me nuts.

As a busy mom and business owner, I’m excellent at triage – prioritizing the important stuff, and saving the less important stuff for another time. But sometimes those little things that you put off, or learn to live with, can really weigh on you, and make your life harder than it has to be. For the past year, I’ve been making a conscious effort to identify the things that over-complicate my life, stress me out, or just plain peeve me, and I’ve been working to address them. In some cases, this means hitting pause on the busy-ness of life long enough to develop a better way to do something. In other cases, it means getting rid of something that isn’t working for me, and replacing it with something better (even if that means spending a little money to get what I want). Here are some of the issues that I’ve addressed recently:

Not having time to vacuum and sweep as often as I wanted to was stressing me out, so we finally invested in a couple robot vacuums (one for upstairs, one for downstairs). They do a better job than we ever could, and free up our time for more important/enjoyable tasks.
No matter how neat I tried to be, I would always get flour all over the counter, when I was spooning it out of the bag and into my measuring cup. So, I finally invested in a flour storage container that’s big enough to catch my spills when I’m measuring.
After 20 years of marriage, several of my measuring cups had gone missing, and I was inexplicably left with a drawer full of 1/3 cups. This would drive me nuts every time I worked in the kitchen, so I finally invested in a few sets of heavy-duty measuring cups, and added the old ones to my craft stash.
I had one set of measuring spoons that were designed to fit inside a spice jar, and several that didn’t. I would grumble every time the “good” set was dirty because the other sets made measuring harder and messier. I finally bought a few more sets of the ones I like, and gave my kids the old ones. They’re just starting out in life, so they were happy to have them; and I’m happy to have what works best for me.

What are your goals for 2022? I’d love to hear about them in the comments.