Shrinking To-Do List

My To-Do list is losing weight, serious weight. I'm not sure if it's the Covid19 virus thing - stay at home as much as possible... or my new productivity method of scheduling things into my calendar but... there is some serious stuff getting done in and around our house.


Some of these things have been living on my to-do list for years. Yes, years. Some have only been there for months... but they all carry weight. Every time I looked at these incomplete projects, I'd feel a blip of guilt and a fleeting thought of "Gotta get to that"... And then I'd move on and ignore that little blip and that fleeting thought. Except... they'd still be there in the background, niggling at me. It gets exhausting after a while, carrying all that extra weight around.

But now... time seems to have expanded and with nothing better to do... I am tackling these projects and loose-ends with gusto.

Case in point... we had a wood-burning fireplace, complete with faux stone surround and hearth. FYI, this is one of those zero-clearance fireplaces (basically a metal insert), not a brick fireplace.

We decided to get an electric fireplace instead (our street does not have natural gas and it would have cost $$$$ to get the line extended).

Void left by hearth...

Sooo... we stripped off the wooden mantel, pulled down the faux stone, tore out the hearth and had a guy come in and install the electric fireplace and build us a nice stacked-stone looking fireplace surround.

Soooo much nicer! Less mess from wood and ash and so much easier to maintain and get started. Just the press of a button.

See the seam where flooring meets...

Except... removing the hearth, left a big void in the laminate flooring where the hearth had sat. We had extra laminate flooring, so I laid some perpendicular to the prevailing flooring and there it sat. It needed some floor trim to cover the three seams where old flooring met patched-in flooring. It even got the oak floor trim and stained it the right colour. But then just laid it down loosely and... we covered most of it with an area rug. But I still knew that the incomplete flooring trim was there... and it ate away at me.

Voila - finished floor trim...

Enter Covid19 and... I dug out the my little MasterCraft mitre saw and cut up some trim to finish another project (3 years old) and decided to do the floor trim as well. If I'm going to haul out the mitre saw... I might as well put it to good use!

It was a bit of a tricky business requiring 45° cuts and figuring out lengths because my trim pieces weren't long enough for the entire length of the hearth area and... well... it got done in less than half an hour.

WTF. Thirty minutes of work to complete this project versus the 15 months of niggling reminders and guilt as it sat undone. Sigh.

But... this is how my life has been the last week or so... getting a bunch of heavy-weight to-dos off of my list that have been sitting there for far tooooo long.