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I don’t know if you all realized this or not, but we’re leaving in less than two weeks on our ginormous, cross-country, summer RV road trip ! Ack!

We started planning this three years ago. You can go read that post that I wrote back in the early stages, but the itinerary and the plans look a lot different now. For one thing, we bought our travel trailer. And then our new travel trailer. You can read more about the updated plan over on the travel blog.

We’re going to be gone for eight whole weeks. “Are you all ready for your trip?” people keep asking me, and I say, “no. not at all.”

But I’m getting there! I’m making good progress on getting the house super-duper clean, at least comparatively, because we’re going to have house sitters staying here, and I can’t just move all the crap to the other side of the room and then take a picture of exactly what I want them to see like I can with all of you.

I’ve been buying stuff we need for the trailer over the past few weeks, but pretty much no actual packing has happened yet. I’m hoping to have the house completely and totally finished over the next few days so that I’ll have a full week to devote to getting the trailer ready. The good side of all of this is that if we didn’t have someone staying here I’d probably be completely neglecting the house to focus on the trailer, and we’d be coming home to a disaster in a couple of months.

But as it is, we’ll be coming home to an as clean as it gets dining room!

Sadly, I’m not all happy with the state of the dining room right now, even when it’s all cleaned up. Also, I need to come up with a really exciting (to Abe) way to display Abe’s artwork, because right now he insists on taping it all directly to the wall. But you know what you are seeing for the first time in that photo, even though it’s not a perfectly decorated dining room? It’s my whole dining room fitting comfortably into one shot. Thanks, wide angle lens!

I cleaned and got wide angle shots of the master bath, too (this was sort of on the fly and without my tripod; I want to try again):

So what does the big cross-country road trip mean for the blog?

Well, in a perfect world, I would have been working busily on the house, completing and shooting a bunch of projects that I could slowly roll out the reveals of over the summer from the road.

But we don’t live in a perfect world, do we?

In addition to all the cleaning and trip prepping, we have been working on a very big project–our deck repair/rebuild–and I’ll be talking more about that later, but probably I’ll already have told you about everything we’ve gotten done before we leave before the trip starts. But I won’t leave you Boxy Colonial-less all summer!

Of course, you can follow along with the trip over on the travel blog. I’m sure I’ll be working on the detailed posts for months after the summer, but I’m planning to do a quick weekly update over there as we go and get started working on the longer posts. But I’ll also save the posts that are more design/house oriented for here, like I’ve been doing for the past few months. I’m still working on a list of places I want to see/show, but I know we have a president’s house or two coming up, and I want to do the tour of Old Faithful Inn at Yellowstone, to give you a couple of examples.

And we also have a lot of house projects coming up in the late summer and into the fall, so I’ll be doing some talking about our plans for those things. Like this giant deck/porch project: there are a whole lot of decisions we still need to make out there, so I’ll be posting about that and hoping someone’s out there to read and offer some thoughts. It’s funny; summer tends to be when most bloggers slow down on projects because kids are out of school and all that, and it’s also when people tend to read blogs the least….usually that’s no good for us because summer is when Dave’s off work and we have the most time for projects. But this summer we’ll fit right in!

So that’s what the next couple of months will look like around here. I hope to have at least one and sometimes two posts up every week (although, of course, family time and seeing natural wonders and all that are the first priorities on this trip), and I hope that some of you at least have been enjoying the historic house tour posts and won’t mind seeing them pretty frequently for awhile. But if they’re not your thing, I understand, and I have lots of stuff we’re doing around here that perhaps you will find helpful or at least interesting content coming up soon, too!

Oh, also! I have to brag on Ari and Dave; they just finished a run of A Few Good Men at a local theater, and they were both awesome! I’m very proud of them, even though without A Few Good Men, my deck would probably already be finished. Ari played Cpl. Howard (they changed the name, but it’s the character Noah Wyle played in the movie) and Dave played Kendrick (Keifer Sutherland’s character).