Watch: Professor John Dyson's inaugural lecture at the University of Birmingham – 'In search of treasure and redemption'

We’ve got to make this better.

Even doing something for 5 minutes a week is a billion times better than doing nothing at all.. And once I started just doing a teeny tiny bit each day, that’s when the progress really seemed to start picking up..The progress and the fact that the hall just keeps looking prettier and prettier every day is like a perfect little gift I get to open every day.

Did I tell you I found the paint in my basement?.It’s going to be stunning about 10 15-minute installments from now..I feel like I should tell you that I can’t wait to show you the big reveal, but the truth is I can wait.

I’m loving this!Well, yes, actually I am.I’m sure that I like all these cafe curtains that I’ve been seeing around.

I’m sure that I like the idea behind mine and I think it was fun to totally cheat my way through making them.. I’m not sure that I like these particular ones in this particular front hall application, though..

I started with one of my Walmart flour sack dish towels, and drew a really simple window pane plaid on it in Sharpie.. Then I cut it to size and hot glued the top to make room for the “curtain rod”….They started out by using this super-long chainsaw-on-a-stick thing to remove all of the smaller lower branches.. Then, we actually had to  have our power line to the house disconnected so that all the machinery could be moved in closer to the tree..

Since Chris was home that day to watch the spectacle, we decided to also paint our kitchen cabinets.And of course the power was out, so we painted our cabinets basically in the dark because, as you can see, it was a pretty cloudy day.

It was also cold and windy so we had to do our work inside.They turned out really nice though!