As part of the 31 Days of Nothing Challenge I'm trying to spend as little to nothing as possible this month. But  we have a lot of work that needs to be done on our house that we're renovating, and finishing up the shed/barn/storage building we built out in the yard. And that gets costly, fast. Sad fact is, with Christmas just past, homeowners insurance due this month, and property taxes already past due, we just can't afford to do any big projects round the house right now.

So I sat down and wrote a list of things we could do that would make progress, but wouldn't cost anything to do, or at least not cost anything to do the prep work for a larger job.
For instance the enclosed upstairs front porch that I used as a storage room for years, I'm wanting to open back up into a front porch again. I cleaned everything out of the room and we tore up the old carpet and tore out the sheetrock ceiling. Now I'm working on removing 1970's paneling from the walls.

My house will never look like this, but this is the general idea of how it should resemble with the two front porches:

Today's weather was a big improvement over two days ago, when it barely got over the freezing mark. Today it was nearly 60*, which felt pretty warm in comparison. We were able to get outside and get some projects done.

J got the Roof Ridge put on the shed and I hauled scrap wood and tin and stuff out, raked the leaves that had gotten in there, and then we rearranged the stuff back inside more organized than it had been.

We turned the compost pile over and I picked up some fallen sticks and limbs from around the yard and put in the burn pile.

We got the Christmas tree out. It'd been undecorated for a few days but I thought J could take it out and right to his truck to take to the convenience center while he was carrying off the garbage today anyway. Turned out I wasn't ready to send it to the shredder yet. It's still such a pretty tree. We just propped it up in front of the shed for now.

There was one more chore that got added unexpectedly to the list that didn't cost us anything today, but probably will in the future - our big upright freezer is going out. The compressor is dying, it's making this terrible loud grinding noise. But lucky for the noise, instead of just going out, I got warning so I was able to start getting everything out before it went bad.
I still didn't get everything out. Even with our kitchen refrigerator freezer, two spare refrigerator freezers, and a small chest freezer I couldn't fit everything that was in that big upright freezer. I left butter and cream cheese in it. Hopefully I can get it relocated before the thing goes completely out.