Getting the house ready

We were so excited about getting this house!... but the downside was that it was SO dirty.  We spent days getting it to a livable level for us, and everybody helped! :)

And so it began....

Carolina loves helping, and I am always so surprised at how good she is at it!

Jonathan is another helper.  He would rather be helping than sitting and playing a video game.  He's one we can always count on!

And when they weren't helping... boys will be boys, right? :)

Once we got the house cleaned, we decided to work on painting and the little tid-bits for the kids rooms, so they would feel like their rooms were theirs.  We have to paint everything back to it's original color when we are done renting the house, and the kids' rooms have these super high vaulted ceilings, so we knew we couldn't paint the walls.  We decided to personalize each room by painting accents.  I wanted to get some of this done before Mom had to leave, because she's the one who has all the expertise with painting! 

The older two boys share a room, and Carolina and Jonathan share a room.  It is always a challenge to figure out how to do a boy/girl room.  Jonathan is SO boy; and while Carolina is pretty tough and can hold her own with the boys, she also has an extremely girlie side.  So, I was trying to figure out how to mesh these two personalities.  We started with making two separate parts of the room that we could make very specific to each of their personalities.  I wanted to put their names on the wall, so we kept the basic outline the same for both, but changed the colors.

We started by taping off Carolina's!

I wanted to do stripes inside, so we started with this, but...

when we took the tape off, it took chunks of the wall off with it. The walls here are not the same as in the States, and it's obviously much harder to work with!  They are not wood and sheet-rock. They are made of concrete and covered with something I don't know. :)  (Wes has to drill a whole into the concrete... we can't just hang nails, either!!  So crazy!)

We had to patch the wall and try again...we ended up painting over the whole thing, but you could still see the stripes through it... It looked pretty unique, so I was fine with it!

Then we started on Jonathan's.  This was hilarious.  We bought paint that was titled "blue jeans."  I liked the color, but what I didn't realize was that it was a texturized paint.  We thought there was something wrong with the paint!  It was so funny, once we figured it out.  You can see it better in the pictures below.

Their two different sides.. one blue, one pink.

See how the paint looks like blue jeans?  We kept putting on more coats, thinking it would even out... until we remember the name of the color.  It does look like jeans, huh?

Mom did such a good job!  I'm so terrible at these things.  I was SO thankful she was here!

Little by little we were getting there!