My dining room is almost finished, but the thing that finally got me to work on it is that we're having new carpet installed on Thursday, and I'm determined to get everything done before then. I definitely don't want to have to paint stuff after the carpet is installed. We'd planned on just buying an area rug and covering most of the floor, but it turned out being just a little more expensive to have the whole room carpeted. The only major thing that'll be left to do in that room after this week will be to furnish it--we desperately need a new dining set, since the tiny 6-year old table that we got at K-Mart will look horrible in such a nice room.
I'm also having a new fence and gates installed, probably next week, in the driveway. The fence will basically extend from the garage to halfway down the driveway, then there will be two gates across the driveway, one 3' and the other one about 11.5'. That will allow us to leave the back door unlocked and let the kids roam freely in and out of the house without worrying about them playing in the heavy traffic out on the street. This was another project I was going to do myself, but it turned out being just a tiny bit more expensive to have a professional do it.
These two things, plus all the other home improvements I've done over the past couple of months, will almost wipe out my tax refund. I still have enough left to build the kids a really nice playset in the back yard, but by then I'll be grateful that the money's gone, and all this work will be behind me.