China prep

I chose orange and got special spray-painting instructions from my whiz-bang crafty friend and our painter and got to work.

Doesn’t that look great up there?  Ha!  I learned that you have to put several really light coats of paint on there to make it even.

This spray paint, unbeknownst to me, painted a fine orange-dust film all over our whole garage which wasn’t the funnest thing to clean up, but I loved how it turned out.

Having a new filing cabinet made it a perfect time to bring in the office boxes from the garage and finally get everything organized.

Let’s just take a look at all those journals from through the years that finally have a spot:

Of course, I had to stop my organizing efforts to read a few of those puppies during the process…most especially the ones from when I was dating Dave, and a few from when I was a whiney little kid that my kids and I laughed our heads off at.  (I adore journals.  More about that back HERE.)

The whole ordeal was a process I tell you, and there are still a few boxes in my garage that I had to abandon until we get back from China.

But it felt so good to get most of it done.

We were so sick of our plain walls that we finally hung up a bunch of things that had been waiting patiently for us for months (because I’m so bad at deciding what I want where).  We figured even if we don’t leave them there forever, at least the renters wouldn’t feel like they were living in a storage building.

Max and I put up our family picture (I’m sure that’s exactly what the renters wanted.  Ha!  But at least it’s not a plain gray wall!).  I wanted to do a map right there by our table like we had in our old house (HERE) but that may have put us in the “map overkill” category.

So for now, it’s a family picture.

Good job Max.

Elle and I put her idea into fruition on her bathroom wall.  We bought a bunch of little frames from IKEA and lined them up for a collage in her bathroom.  Here’s the first row:

Hanging things straight on a wall is quite a big feat, I will admit.

Which made us extra proud when we were done.

I had bought some step stools for the pantry (from IKEA) sitting waiting to be painted and put together since we moved into our house.  I decided, much to Dave’s chagrin, that they needed to be painted before we left.

It was really dumb of me, because it took forever, but I’ll be so happy to have that done when we get back.

Claire’s job was to snuggle babies and hang out as much as possible with her friends 😉  Ha.

Not really, but she was sure mesmerized by our renter’s baby she brought over when we went over all the house stuff.

Claire was actually my second-in-command closet clean-out helper.

And so was Lu.  But she had to take a few breaks to read as many “Mr. Men” books as she possibly could before we left.

In preparation for leaving the United States, I figured it was an appropriate time to get our American flag framed.  Someone gave this to us for our wedding all those years ago and it’s been sitting in a box in our garage ever since.  It is the flag that flew over the capitol building the day we got married.  Isn’t that kind of a cool gift idea?  I’ve been promising Dave to get it framed for years and finally got kicked into gear.

I got to spend some good time at the schools talking to counselors and eventually to check my kids out of school.  This was Grace’s last day.

 I don’t have any idea why we have a picture of this, but we were sure happy about something.  I love my driving buddy Elle.

…and that we had a car to drive anywhere we needed.  We learned the hard way (about six times so far) that empty taxis will pass you all night long if you try to get one after 5:00 in the evening (I guess they’re all spoken for because people reserve them with iPhone apps).  Yikes.  We are learning all kinds of little gems like that every day.