101 in 1001 #3, Check-In #2

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I can’t believe I’m already 20% of the way through my third 101 in 1001 list! If you’re unfamiliar, it’s a list of 101 things I’d like to accomplish in 1,001 days, or about 2.75 years.

Every 100 days, I check in with my progress and see what I’ve completed, what I’m working on, and what things I want to change. Let’s get to it!

4 Goals Being Changed

My list is flexible—in the end, it’s a list of things I want to accomplish, and if I no longer want to accomplish something, why keep it on the list? So every check-in, I allow myself to change as many goals as I see fit. This time around, I’m changing 4.

6. Get to level 5 1 in all Spanish lessons on Duolingo.

Duolingo keeps adding lessons, and I realized I was speeding through lessons to try to cross this item off instead of really working to learn Spanish. I’m changing this to Level 1 so I can spend more time practicing and getting familiar with the new words I’m learning. It will still be hard, but not impossible!

38. Get all but 50 100 items in Stylebook down to $1 per wear.

One of the biggest reasons I use Stylebook is to calculate my cost per wear, with the goal of getting everything down to $1 per wear. While I think this is a really good goal to ensure I’m wearing the things I buy and creating less waste, I started to get unhealthy habits around it, wearing a piece to death just to get it down to $1 CPW and then getting sick of it.

I decided to remove the cost of all of my nail polish from the app, which got me down to 60 items with a cost of more than $1 per wear, and then decided I was done. Really, I wanted to be able to see all of the items that have a CPW greater than $1 between the 50 lowest CPW and 50 highest CPW displays, and 100 does that just as well as 50.

29. Add a ceiling fan to the main bedroom. Frame and hang our Venice poster.

We’ve decided that a ceiling fan would likely be too much in our bedroom, so I’m swapping this out for a project we’ve wanted to do for… 7 years now: framing a poster we got in Venice back in 2014!

30. Add a ceiling fan to Replace the ceiling light in the guest bedroom.

Similarly, a ceiling fan is too big for the guest room, but I broke the existing light last year and haven’t replaced it yet. It hasn’t been a huge deal because we haven’t had guests, but I’d like to replace it soon!

7 Goals Completed

I’m up to 16 items completed so far! I’m 4 behind where I “should” be now that we’re 20% of the way through the 1,001 days, but I definitely overloaded this list with long-haul tasks. Any progress is still progress!

27. Install curtains throughout the house.

We just completed this one last week when we installed curtains in the guest room! Now the main bedroom, guest bedroom, living room, and dining room all have curtains, which we love. They definitely help the house feel homey.

29. Frame and hang our Venice poster.

It only took us 7 years! We finally sent out Venice poster to Framebridge and hung it up in the sunroom! See it here.

36. Add some sort of barrier next to the sunroom and porch.

When we redid the porch, we realized that there really wasn’t any sort of barrier between our house and our neighbor’s house. Their main path to their backyard is on that side, so they’re constantly walking back and forth about 10 feet from us.

It wasn’t a huge deal when the porch was a mudroom, but now that we sit out there regularly, we wanted to add some sort of plants or other barrier between the porch and their path. We ended up getting four evergreens that will fill out the space really nicely! It doesn’t necessarily help now, but it will be a big improvement next summer.

38. Get all but 100 items in Stylebook down to $1 per wear.

See above for the explanation on this one!

40. Organize the laundry room.

We love our laundry room now. See all the details here.

42. Organize the main room of the basement.

When we got our new laundry room cabinets, most of the items in the main room could be put away in the laundry room! Then we had enough shelving and cabinets for what was left. It’s so nice now.

78. Make an embroidered table cloth of visitors’ signatures.

I’m going to do a full post on this sometime soon, but I’m so glad I’ve started this project! It’s a tradition my grandma started and my mom continued, and now I’m working on my own! Whenever someone comes to the house, I have them sign a white tablecloth in pencil, and then I embroider their signature. After a while the whole thing fills up, and it’s fun to read through all of the names!

When my grandma died, I got hers, and I’ll eventually get my mom’s, too! All of the embroidery on my grandma’s is black, and my mom’s is a whole bunch of colors, so I’m doing ours in a bunch of shades of blue.

91. Get all of KK Slider’s songs in Animal Crossing: New Horizons.

I had to wait until my birthday to get the final song (I don’t time travel), but I finally have all of them now!

18 Goals in Progress

Now to the goals I’m slowly but surely making progress on! There’s… a lot. Again, I really overloaded this list with long-haul projects.

1. Beat my past 101 in 1001 record of 68.

Slowly but surely! Inching my way closer to my previous record.

6. Get to level 1 in all Spanish lessons on Duolingo.

I practice every day! I’m now just past the 4th checkpoint of 9.

10. Max out 401Ks, IRAs, and HSAs for me and Sean in a single calendar year.

We’re so close. We might be able to do it this year! Once we paid off our student loans, we funneled all of the money we were putting toward loan payments into our retirement accounts. Our initial estimates this year put us just below maxing out, but with some raises I think we can do it!

11. Boost our emergency fund to $15k.

We’re contributing every month and trying not to spend anything from it unless we have to!

23. Convert the downstairs fireplace to gas.

Last month we visited the showroom and picked out the insert we want! We had someone come out to the house last week to get final measurements for a quote, and we should be able to get it completed in July.

28. Make a plan and budget for a kitchen renovation.

One weekend recently we spent an entire day in the kitchen talking through goals and making plans. We’re feeling pretty solid about the layout changes we want. Next step is piecing all of that together and making a budget!

34. Improve the entertainment space in the backyard.

Sean has been working hard on the deck for the past few weeks! It originally wrapped around a big tree in the yard, and over time the tree grew and caused the deck to bubble around it. The deck was beautiful, but a lot of it just wasn’t functional. We pulled the deck back so it’s no longer around the tree, and it’s just about complete. Then we need to get new furniture, put in a stock tank pool (#32 on the list!), and get more yard games!

37. Use up all of my old And Possibly Dinosaurs notepads.

Working my way through the pile! I have more than 50 left, so we’ll see if this is realistic. 😅 And to be honest, I’m not sure what I’m going to do when all of the notepads are gone! They’ve become such a staple in my productivity workflow.

59. Visit 10 new-to-me places in Kalamazoo.

We visited Dickey’s Barbecue Pit last week for a pick-up order! Six more to go.

66. Cook my way through an entire cookbook.

I made two more recipes from Cravings: Hungry for More! We relied pretty heavily on HelloFresh over the winter, which didn’t leave much room for recipes from cookbooks, but we’re excited to get back into our own meal planning.

76. Learn to cross-stitch.

I’ve learned the basics of cross-stitch thanks to an awesome Harry Potter kit I got (see photo at the top of this post)! The kit includes back-stitching, so I’m holding off on marking this complete until I wrap up that whole project and learn the back-stitching part, too.

81. Read all previously unread books on Alyse Ruriani’s Anti-Racist Bingo: Reading List Edition.

Since the last check-in, I listed to the audiobook of Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates and loved it.

82. Read all published books by Jenny Han.

I also listened to the audiobook of Shug, a Jenny Han book that I’d never read before! Now I just have her three trilogies left. I have my own copies of the To All the Boys series and the Summer I Turned Pretty series, and I have the Burn for Burn books checked out from the library, so it’s just a matter of prioritizing them over the 50 million other books I want to read!

84. Read the Dear America books.

I read two more books over the past few months: Cannons at Dawn and Standing in the Light.

86. Read the Little House series.

I’m currently reading these now! So far I’ve finished the first two books, Little House in the Big Woods and Farmer Boy.

88. Get framed photos of all of my neighbors in Animal Crossing: New Horizons.

One more to go! I got framed photos of Goldie and Poppy. The last neighbor sucks, so I’m waiting for him to move out so I can replace him with someone better and get their framed photo. 😂

89. Catch all bugs, fish, and sea creatures in Animal Crossing: New Horizons.

So so so close! Just 5 more bugs (all of which aren’t available until July), 4 more fish, and 1 more sea creature! The last sea creature is available in May so I have the feeling I’ll cross that off soon.

98. Watch all of The Golden Girls.

I’m about halfway through the 3rd season of 7!

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Not bad, not bad! Wish me luck as I keep crossing items off my list!