The Adventures of Team Daniels: So. Much. Stuff.

'In their hearts humans plan their course, but the Lord establishes their steps.' Proverbs 16:9

Since living in the UK 13 years ago, I have been telling Abe to find us another overseas assignment. He threw South Korea out there several times, and I always said, "No, not there. Italy or Greece or Australia. Not South Korea." I'm sure God had a good chuckle, because here we are, making plans to head to South Korea for 2 years. I was planning my course to live overseas in Europe, but the Lord established our steps to South Korea instead.

Abe and I had planned our course for moving. He headed over in April for 10 weeks while we finished up school. He would return in mid-June to help get the house prepared for our renters and to get our furnishings ready to ship or store. Once again, the Lord established our steps a little differently than we had planned.

We found super renters from church that we knew and trusted. They were to move in on July 1st, hence Abe returning in mid-June. However, they sold their house and the buyers wanted in on June 1st, not July 1st. I decided that I would rather get the house ready without the help of Abe than to lose our trusted renters. So June 1st it was.

OH. MY.

I had no clue what I was in for. Abe and I moved into our house in 2005. Not only did we acquire a lot of stuff in those 14 years, but we also acquired 3 kids and 2 dogs, who acquired a lot of stuff. The preliminary mover guy came by to get an estimate in mid-May. We were allotted 3,000 pounds to ship to Korea and 16,000 pounds to put into storage. Those are big numbers, and I had no idea what they really looked like. I thought, "Our house is only 2255 square feet, so we can't have that much stuff. Other Lockheed people have houses twice our size, right?" I was just worried about staying under weight for the shipping container.

My super sweet friends Tracy and Hillary came over to help me start organizing in the kitchen. It was super stressful because they made me get rid of things that I did not want to. They kept asking if it felt so good to let go of stuff, but it did not. They would throw stuff in the trash and I would go by and nonchalantly take it out. Sometimes they found it and threw it away again and if I saw it in the trash again I took it out again. By the time they left, we had a whole bunch of bags on the curb.

Little did I know, that was just the start...

I was instructed by the moving company to go around the house and label the things we wanted to ship with us. I was a good little girl and put these pink sticky labels on the things I thought we would bring. The man came and took notes. He guessed about how many boxes we would need for all our stuff and estimated how much they would weigh. He informed me that we were 700 pounds overweight on the air shipment and 3,000 pounds overweight on the storage. What?!? I can't even lose 20 pounds--how was I going to shave off three thousand seven hundred???

Keep in mind this was mid-May. Things at school were really ramping up with the end of year activities. In addition to moving, life was coming at me. And it was coming at me fast and furious.

The first night of scouts that we were on our own, the van was leaking oil. Leaking so much, as in, the light flashed on, the engine made a knocking sound, and it did not even register on the dip stick. I was able to get a couple scout dads to help me add some oil and drive it home, but I discovered a ton of oil spilled in the garage. More accurately, about 6 or 8 quarts were spilled. I had the van towed to the dealership the next day. Thankfully we still had Abe's SUV to drive. I made a quick trip to buy some grease cleaner-upper and added 'cleaning the garage floor' to my list of things to do. I swept and got on my hands and knees and scrubbed it.

In all the purging and sorting I had to take care of several handy-man things, like fixing the shower handle,

glueing the van panel,

resetting the fuse box to reset the washing machine,

and fixing the gate.

I made about 1,524 trips to Berry Good Buys to donate stuff,

and to the book store, as well.

I was buying things we would need, such as luggage and dog crates among other stuff. I measured the dogs several times and looked at several sites to see how big a crate I should buy. Frito's might have been a little excessive, but I wanted to be sure she would have plenty of space since it was such a long flight. I was trying to slowly get the dogs acclimated to spending time in the crates so they wouldn't freak out when they really did use them.

In the midst of packing I made an impromptu trip to Kansas for my grandmother's funeral. I realized before we left that there was a big plastic piece on the bottom of the front fender of the van that was dragging. This had happened a few years back and it folded backwards onto itself while I was driving and was a big ordeal. So I got my headlamp and twist ties and got under the car to fix it.

I advertised and sold things. Well, mostly I advertised and then ended up donating things.

Did I mention I threw a threw away a lot of stuff?

I donated a bunch of sentimental things from the kids' rooms.

Over the years I spent countless hours rocking my three babies in this glider. We had to get a pic of me rocking each of my kiddos one last time. I hope the chair blesses another family.

I got out power tools to unhang things.

I called in the troops, aka the Shaws, to store some things for us, like the trampoline and the smoker.

And there was sentimental stuff that is absolutely worthless but from my childhood that I got rid of.

And there was sentimental stuff that is absolutely worthless but sweet that I got rid of.

Did I mention that I threw away a lot of stuff?

What about donations--did I mention that I made a lot of trips to donate things?

I made videos for the renters of how to do things, like going into the attic to change the filters.

I spoke to the police about a robber. One day a petty thief jumped the back fence from the neighbor's yard and came into ours. Not sure what would have happened if Frito hadn't swooped in to scare him and save the day. He hightailed it out of our yard as soon as she ran at him. (FYI--This is not a common thing for our neighborhood. So rare that residents from the next street over saw the guy in our yard and my boys' strange reaction so they turned down our street to yell at the man.) Excitement for a Friday evening that gave me a bit of a break from packing and purging.

I went with the new tenants to pick out paint colors.

I carried a lot of big things to the curb.

I found plant sitters and delivered all of them to my wonderful mother-in-law and friend.

I had one big pile of Korean stuff, things to be stored, things to donate, and things to throw out. I was pretty much at my wits end. We got out the scale and tried to weigh the Korean pile to see if we were still 700 pounds over.

Finally it was moving days. It just so happened that in all this I was arranging for house items to be repaired that I could not do, like the AC that took 2 weeks to get fixed, and leaky faucets and an oven light that wouldn't go off and the microwave that had a hole in the top. And the painters. There was one day that I had movers, repairmen, and painters there all at the same time. The renters needed to start getting their stuff out, so I had the movers get the garage done first so the renters could leave their stuff in there.

We had awards ceremonies, inductions, school trips, birthday parties to go to, music concerts, going away parties, ordering birthday cake, etc. etc. going on this time, as well. I'm writing this almost 4 months after, so I'm sure there is a lot I am forgetting. It makes my head spin just thinking about it. I kept telling the kids I was at the end of my rope and I was about to lose it. I was not exaggerating with that statement.

Late one night Daisy had reset her luggage lock. We had discussed what the combination would be. As soon as she set it, she couldn't get it opened. We tried the combo and we tried numbers that were one off of each digit. We tried the original '000'. Nothing worked. This was right in the midst of one of my 'I'm about to lose it' moments; a brand new suitcase that we couldn't even use?!? Bless his heart, Zekers sat down and started going through numbers starting at 001, 002, and continued.

Believe it or not, he got it opened after about 10 minutes! The number that opened it was nothing remotely close to what she had meant to set it to. We all had a good laugh, which was what I needed.

After the movers were out the painters finished up.

I kept losing my phone every 5 minutes. I have never been so thankful for my watch that tings the phone to find it. There were a few times that it got lost in the movers' and painters' stuff.

So glad I wasn't doing the painting. This room looks great though, doesn't it?

This was my May. I got the call to be out at the beginning of the month. It took a couple weeks to really sink in all that I had to do. And I did it. We pulled into the hotel about 9:30 the night before the movers were coming. As we pulled up I discovered that the lid was off of the detergent and the entire remains of the jug spilled in the car all over everything.