Details, details!

Welcome to our travel adventure blog!

We'll be detailing the plans, trials, and tribulations of our trip to Europe in 2007, and all the events leading up to the actual departure. If all goes well, we'll get the house rented out and be able to stay for a year or so. We fly away to distant shores on April 3.

Managing the details of the trip and getting the house ready has already been quite the ordeal, way more than we expected. Right now, I'm definitely missing the apartment days when you could just give notice and be moved out. It's a lot more complicated trying to get the house ready to go: hiring a property management company, figuring out temporary address changes, deciding how much storage will be needed...the list seems endless. I should say lists...how nice it would be to only have one list!

Our main concern is getting the house rented. But, we bought 3-month return tickets just in case the house doesn't rent by June 1. At least we'll still have an adventure, even if it's shorter than we'd originally hoped for.

Today, the box man is coming to drop off a load of moving boxes. Since I adamantly refuse to pack at the last minute, I'm starting early. We have some cleanup and painting to do anyway, so as things are moved out of the way for the painting, they are going to be packed up. The plan is to pack up all our personal stuff anyway, so I can do a little bit at a time and not get overwhelmed. I'd rather have boxes stacked everywhere for a while than drive both of us crazy trying to cram all the packing into a weekend.

Luckily, our fabulous family members are helping us with some of our storage needs...mostly personal stuff that we wouldn't want to get damaged if something happened to the storage unit (you know, like the tsunami). Packing early allows us to parse out the boxes to the respective homes whenever we need to make a trip.

Painting the hallway will probably start over the weekend. Kevin has finished most of the patching, and we just have a little bit of sanding to do. Once the hallway is finished, we'll move on to the front room, which is pretty big and will be more labor intensive. It's going to look great when we finish.