Okay – maybe that title is a bit of a stretch.  Technically, it would only take a leap and a jump to get this room all set for some pilot guests again.

The room looked like this when I started:

It doesn’t really look like much of a project, does it?

Well HA!  :)  The dresser and closet were conveniently closed up tight in those before photos.

But now, oh dear friends, now…

They’re totally empty of old movies, random leftovers from guys gone by, one bazillion metal hangars, sand art paintings, and just all sorts of general stuff.

Everything that’s left in the room is labeled.  I have a plan.

An older guy down the road can even use the beds as guest beds in his house.  How perfect is that?  I slapped on a label.  He’s getting the full hookup, right down to the alarm clock.

I know it’s not a huge overhaul.  But I’m all about celebrating the little victories around here.  Sometimes it’s so easy to ditch stuff.  Other times, you stop and stare at it like you just don’t know what to do.

I know you’ve had that feeling before!

Decluttering a space that belonged to someone else is easier and harder all at the same time. It’s easier because I have no sentimental attachment to any of the things here.  They don’t have memories and stories for me.  As it’s time to move to the more modern aviation supplies, however, I’m at a complete lost.  I don’t know what’s important.  I don’t know what’s needed.  I find myself doing silly little tasks that are in themselves very helpful.  Take down a poster here.  Peel off a sticker way over there.  Walk all the way over there to put one little trinket in the donate pile…  In the big picture, those tasks just are not so effective.

So I pause.  I wonder:

• Where can I find some big strong men with time to spare?  I have some beds to haul down some stairs.
• Who wants that little brown couch/bed thingy under the mirror?

What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever stumbled on while decluttering?  And… why not?  Do you want a brown couch/bed thingy?

Today I have to thank you, dearest blog readers.

(confession: there is a teary girl at her desk writing this)

(now there is a teary, laughing girl at her desk, thinking how sappy that confession sounds! wah wah.)

(Beth Jennings snapped this photo of me in Berlin… don’t I look all city-savvy?!)

Each time you go to Gadanke and purchase a journal, you are putting your trust in me.  Our family strongly believes that we vote with every dollar we spend.

Thank you for voting for me.

Thank you for voting for your stories.

My uncle told us the most incredible story over the 4th of July.  As he spoke, my grandma’s face lit up.  She’s 93 years old.  It is rare that she follows the rapid conversation that tends to take place as we get excited.  Usually, she’ll shout, “Wait while I put my ears on!”

(She means her hearing aids in her pocket.)

It’s even rarer for her to take over the telling of an old story.  But she did…

She was pregnant with my uncle; my grandfather was in the service.  It was WWII, and he was scheduled to ship overseas.  The very day his unit shipped out, he got a call.  My uncle was born.

My grandfather got to go meet his new baby.  But his unit left without him.

After that, the army didn’t know what to do with him.  So they gave my grandfather a desk job in the US.

He never fought abroad.  We’ll never know what would have happened if he had.

My dad was born about 10 years later.

I can think of so many “what ifs”.  Aren’t there a million of those in all our lives?

It is incredible how the smallest moments can change our lives… and change the lives of generations and generations that follow.

(freezing my butt off in May… Gadanke’s 1st birthday)

I’m not sure if Gadanke could impact future generations.  I dream that maybe it could.  A reporter is coming to the tire house to interview me in a few hours, and Gadanke is about to be published in TWO magazines.  Wow.  ME?!  I am so thankful, I don’t even know how to write it down without jumping up and down at the exact same time.

Here’s what typing + jumping looks like:

fjfaij;afjsf;j

Here’s what jumping looks like by an airplane (WITH AN ENGINE IN IT):

I’m already really grateful for all of your support and ideas as we go through the clutter of the hangar.  I’m rounding up all the questions from this post.  Dang – you guys have good ideas!

Well… except for you, Miss Kristin.  This morning, she wrote, “I think you should bring all the headsets and various other junk to Berlin with you the next time you visit and sell it at Mauerpark!”

Folks – the Mauerpark Flea Market in Berlin has to be like the world’s BIGGEST junk pile!  (Though I did find this little bowl once.. it was chipped in the box.)  Some venders just have boxes and boxes of stuff.  Half of it is broken from being smashed up in these boxes.  You can get a huge dose of the native Berlin accent – which I still can’t understand a word of.  Or you can find a lot of expats with little piles and old bikes on the lawn; they’re trying to cash out before moving home.

Kristin , thank you for the huuuuuuge laugh! I’m calling Martin at the airport right now to tell him your brilliance.  (I think I’ll skip on telling him what a grateful bawl baby I’m being.)

You guys, NONE of this could have ever happened without your kindness, your encouragement, or your journal purchases.  You are believers.  And how did I get to be so lucky to have you believe in me?  How did I get so lucky to be a part of your stories?

You could bet we’d be having a little party over here if it weren’t for one problem.  I’m beat!

On Saturday morning (which you may have spotted on Facebook), I walked into this:

Everything needed to go.  I just didn’t know where.

Anyone else having flashbacks to The Decluttering Project you and I all did last year?

I loved unearthing old photos like these ones.  (The newspaper article listed all their names; I blurred it for privacy.)  Those pictures went into the keep pile.

Or look at this old photo from Oshkosh – the world’s biggest aviation gathering.

Martin totally caught me drooling over all the stories.  Into the keep pile.  A typewriter.  A couple clipboards.  A Made in USA stapler.  Whoosh!  We’ll keep those.

When everything was all said and done, the keep pile wasn’t all that big:

Oh!  But the donation pile for the library was huge.  When I called the librarian about all the aviation materials I wanted to give her, I’m pretty sure she got a little teary.  America’s rural libraries are in desperate need of materials (more on that here).

Now if there are any budding pilots, mechanics, or kids who want to learn about planes in our county (or any neighboring rural county through local exchanges), our library’s got ‘em covered.

A little Martin 20 years younger would have fainted.

I have a feeling we’re going to be best buds with the recycling center and thrift shop.

Unfortunately, I haven’t buddied up to them enough to convince them to come pick up any of our goods.  In fact, that’s probably the worst thing about rural life.  We don’t even have a garbage man. Eww, right?  We have to haul trash about 10 or 15 miles to a bunch of dumpsters.

But enough trash talk.  Want to see what’s left?

I still had a few things left to deal with when I went back to finish the job on Tuesday morning.  (Remember – I started on a Saturday. Sundays are always work free, then Monday was all about Gadanke.  So boom – there I was back in the training room on Tuesday like nothing had ever happened.)  And in fact, nothing had happened.  The room was exactly as I left it.  Except for a little more dust.

It finally happened… POOF.  This:

Became THIS:

One room down.  ONE ROOM DOWN!  Yeahhhh.

All this decluttering has got me wondering…  what’s the hardest room or hardest thing for you to declutter?  Is it papers like me?  The bedroom?  Garage?  Wait – don’t tell me.  It’s your stash of hundreds of dusty aviation books, too, isn’t it?  I knew it.

It is going to be an intense few months around here.  Keeping Gadanke awesome as it grows and grows!  Building a home.  Connecting with our community.  Getting planes up and out of the way.  Figuring out how to heat a whole hangar just a little and the home inside of it a bit more… in the greenest way possible.  Juggling balls I’ve never even seen before.

We want to be out of the tire house this late autumn.

We want to be all nestled in newly remodeled here when it starts to snow:

We know.  It’s CRAZY.

Our motto is going to have to be by Thomas Jefferson:

I’m a great believer in luck and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.

“We can do this!” the cheer squad shouts.

The cheer squad is me; the cheer squad is Martin.  Every so often, we have to be really loud.

We sat down to play Settlers of Catan with some friends after a week of work (love that game!).  I would have worried about Martin’s nose landing right in the plate of watermelon as he nearly nodded off.  But I was too busy pinching my own arm.  ”Stay awake, Katie, stay awake.”

We lost miserably.

But then we took a break.  Taking time to rest is always so important.

THANKFULLY, we have a strict rule : Sundays are always free. We’re not afraid to head down to the campground for an afternoon ice cream cone.  Naps are our best friends.  There is always time for dinner with friends or a 4th of July family reunion in the mountains.

Too bad it’s Monday.

I’m just kidding! The incredible thing is that all day, I’m doing what I love or I’m working toward it.

“We can do this!”

I’d like to compile a list of questions and answers you guys might have. About running a small business.  About the hangar.  Oh gosh – maybe even about my favorite colors or about Martin and me in general.  Will you let me know in the comments?

Confession : When I sing in the shower, I sing silly kid songs.  I sing about hippos eating too many cookies and cakes.  I trill over bow-legged chickens and knock-kneed hens.

I wrote children’s poetry in college.  (A deep secret of mine is to publish some of them one day.)

And I was constantly asked if I was going to work with kids one day.

So it’s really not too surprising that the journal I’ve been most asked about is THIS ONE.  And at last. IT IS HERE!

Introducing…

{Jump Up!} ~ Kid’s Journal

This is the journal that got my editing team laughing more than ever before.

This is the journal that we wish we had when we were kids.

There’s the silly stuff like if I had a tail writing prompts.

My inspiration came from watching my young cousins, witnessing German kids that I could not verbally understand (but they’d still try to chat with me!), and all the gobs and gobs of summer camp memories from kindergarten to last summer.

In addition to the silliness, there was one thing that I REALLY wanted to capture in this book more than anything.

I wanted to capture children’s stories as they know life RIGHT NOW.  So there are also cleverly disguised prompts to urge kids to document who they are and what their lives are like right now like:

THANK YOU a million times over for all of your support and handmade journal orders.

I did a lot of the design work for this children’s journal in Germany, and I hope kids love this {Jump Up!} book just as much as Martin and I both do.  In fact – Martin started writing in one himself!  haha.

I’m so excited to be sharing this little hangar tour with you guys today.  I’ve already put in a couple of days of scrubbing and decluttering, though maybe you’d hardly tell.  There’s just so much work ahead… and I’m not even on the airplane building brigade!

You can see our entire future apartment in this slightly older photo.  Our home is all going to be upstairs in the back.  Half of that space is currently enclosed; half is out in the open and full of random stuff.

Want to take a tour with me as I saw it this morning?

You take the stairs to the right of the airplane, behind the display case.

Can you see that display case being filled with Gadanke journals?  haha.  Gadanke actually has some much bigger things in store for it.  Shall we go upstairs and see?

Here we are a few steps short of the top.

A huge line of old headsets decorates the far back.  What do you do with those sorts of things?  The thrift shop couldn’t use them.  Most pilots wouldn’t.  Headset technology has seriously improved (in terms of weight and comfort, amount of noise blocked, and quality of radio transmissions being made and received).

There are a lot of these “what do we do with that” questions.

A lot.

Now take a few steps forward.  Look to your left.  The picture above is your new view.

This area is my FAVORITE.  I like it because (1) I can see the space so well, so it’s super easy to visualize its future, and (2) it’s going to be Gadanke’s home.

Yeppers!  Gadanke is no longer going to be located an arm’s reach from our bed.  It’s moving into this 300 square foot (28 square meter) area.  I’ll be sharing it with Martin.

He won’t be an arm’s reach from dinner any more.  (His desk has always been in our living space.)

Unfortunately, this space just hasn’t been utilized very well in the past.  So everyone around here is just so excited.  There also seems to be a lot of sighing that includes words like “youth”, “energy”, “Katie and Martin”, and “crazy”.

But oh my gosh – there are some awesome old aviation posters that are begging to be reintroduced.  I think there are a lot of stories and photographs up here.  One of my goals for the future is to really pull out those stories.

Now should we peek into the future house?

Behind Door Number One…

This is the little guest room.  It’s roughly where our bedroom is going to be, too.

Here’s me snapping photos in there for you this morning.  So excited!

The window behind me here is the ONLY window in the future house.  Neither Martin nor I have any clue how to create windows in an old hangar.  But we will.

And here’s behind Door Number Two.  It was a pilot training room.

This area will be our living room/kitchen/probable guest room if we can pinch enough money to get a sofa bed.  Yeah… there’s going to be a lot of penny pinching to make this remodel happen.

This place is going to be sooo much smaller than the tire house.  And we’re loving it!

You know when you find something that feels so right?  Small homes are exactly that for us.

So I’ll be the first to admit:  ”crazy” is a word that certainly comes to mind.  But mostly?  It’s the “crazy, crazy, crazy EXCITED” that’s running through my sunburned mind.

I’d love to hear your thoughts.  Any must-do tips for creating a small home?  Any remodeling know-how to share?

I guess it’s safe to say that you know where you can find me for the rest of the day.