Cat Tower

The kitten is driving us nuts.  He's got energy to spare!  The last time we had a kitten in the house, the kids were in early elementary school, and they had the energy to match his.  Sixteen years later, we just don't have the same energy.  Heck we only have one of the three kids living at home now, and she's in class or studying most of the time.





We had looked at cat towers at Pet Smart and Wal Mart, but we just couldn't find it in our hearts to shell out almost $200 for a structure for a cat to climb and romp upon.

Husband, being the wonder that he is, went out and spent $40 on some indoor/outdoor carpet, sisal rope, and some boards. He combined that with what we have at home to make a cat structure that is well over 8 feet tall.

The long boards will be covered with sisal rope. 

The platforms are covered with carpet.  The top two platforms have sides to keep the cat from falling off.  It's structured so that the new structure ties in with the cat runway we built onto the windowsill.  We've got a few more levels to add to this structure - out to the right side - to give them a little more climbing room.  We're also going to add an enclosed box to at least one of those levels.

Hobbes enjoys rolling around on the level platforms and chasing his tail.

The only problem is that he is measuring - you can see him bobbing up and down to measure the distance - to see if he can jump from the top platform onto the chandelier.

All in all, it's a really cool cat tower.  It really is a shame that we don't love our cats at all.  Poor creatures just struggle to survive. 

Indoor Plumbing

Finally, finally, finally.  Our indoor plumbing is up and running!

The plumber had to come out and dig the line out from the house to the septic tank, and then replace the line from inside of the house, through the foundation wall, and out to the tank.  Our plumber showed up at 8 am this morning to begin work on what I thought was going to be a massive undertaking.  3 hours later, the line was replaced, water was running out of the house (instead of into the basement) and we are able to use our indoor pipes once again!

The bonus?  Our plumber upgraded the plumbing on that line to meet current building code!  Who-Hoo! One less thing to worry about!

Backhoe coming up the hill.

This is where the pipe failed.

 

Pipe is gone!  There's sunshine coming through that hole!

New pipe in place, cement around the hole.  Now to clean up that wall...

Pipe from the outside - house to the septic tank.

We lost the bush here. The pipe you see coming up from the ground is the clean out for the plumbing. Building code met.

Total Time: 3 hours 15 minutes.
Ability to use indoor plumbing: priceless.

BTW: This is where I wanted to fix the landscaping in front of the house.  Do you remember my resolution to fix the landscaping here?  This is the spot!  I'm glad the backhoe took out the bush instead of us! (He wouldn't agree to take out the rest of them, though.)

Bats in the Belfrey

I originally published this post on August 15, 2014.  Enjoy!

I wish I had pictures to share.  I really, really do.  Unfortunately, as this story unrolled, I ended up dropping the camera, and running away screaming.  Since the husband had the hose on and there were bats everywhere - well... at least the camera wasn't toast, but I also didn't want to get any closer.

We live in a brick rancher.  Do you know those roof vents over the ends of the house?  We have three of them.  One over the carport, and two over the "T" at the other end of the house.

The vents are screened on the inside to keep out birds and other beasties.

I park on the pad next to the carport.

This time last week, as I was getting out of the car, I looked down at the ground and saw lots of tiny little black things.  They looked like hamster pellets, in a way.  There were tons of these things.  I ended up backing up my car so that I wouldn't walk through it and track stuff through the house.

Bravely, I looked up into the vent and saw lots and lots of little black things.

Bats.  The stuff on the ground (and all over the siding) was bat guano.  Not a good thing.

When husband got home, I mentioned it to him.  He got the ladder out, got close enough to look inside and said one word "bats".  He climbed up into the attic to verify that there were no bats inside of the attic.

After he changed clothes, he went to Home Depot and picked up some fiberglass netting.

He came home, and began spraying water from the garden hose on the parking pad and siding, attempting to get the guano off.

The bats really didn't like that.  They left.  Over 2 dozen of them flew out, all over everywhere.

Husband then decided that he would spray up into the vent in order to get any other bats out of the vents.  A couple dozen more flew out.

Yeah, by this point, I was long gone.  I actually took off once the bats started flying out.

Once he was certain no more bats were coming out, he climbed up onto the ladder, and measured the vent.  He cut the fiberglass netting to fit over the vents.  He used the staple gun to attach the netting on two sides.  He has left the bottom open - so that it's an exclusion net.  Just in case if any more bats were hanging out in there, they can get out, but not get back in.

Last night, he climbed back up the ladder with a flashlight to verify that all of the bats were gone.

He then stapled the bottom of the netting across the bottom of the vent.

We still have another vent that is loaded with bats.  Absolutely full.

We have plans to put up a couple of bat houses on the property, before we work to get them out, so that they can have a new home to go roost in.

But where do these houses go?  They like to be up high.  We have an elm tree that's high, but that tree is sick and will have to come down within the next five years - so we don't want to put it there.  And we really don't want them roosting inside of the house or the attic.  With the amount of bats we have in this particular vent, if any more move in, it is possible that they could pop the screen out and take up residence in our attic.  And that would be a bad thing.

Now, if we could just get the telephone company to come in and install a couple of poles for us in the back yard, I would know exactly where to put the houses!

The Hall Bathroom

So, this resolution has been on my list for 2 years now.  I keep saying that I am going to write about what happened in this bathroom.  Today is the day.  I am going to tell the tale of the hallway bathroom.

We bought this house from my in-laws 10 years ago.  They picked up what they wanted and moved out - leaving us with a house full of trash and a promise that they would "fix" everything once they moved out.   Our friends call this place "The Money Pit".  Since the day we've moved in here, we have thrown good money after bad, and spent money we don't have trying to make the place liveable.

Anyway - onto the bathroom fiasco.  This particular disaster began several years ago - we'd been in the house a little over a year at the time.

We have a 2 bathroom house,  1 bath in the master bedroom, and 1 in the hallway, that the kids share.

We were sitting in the kitchen one evening, eating dinner, when we heard a horrific crash from the back of the house.  We rushed back to the bathroom to find that the walls in the shower had collapsed.  Thank heavens none of the kids were in there at the time!

This is what the bathroom looked like:

Tiles in the tub.

At first, we thought "all" we were going to have to do was put a new tile backer on the wall and then put the tile back up.  Wrong.

Mold - scary black mold and mildew had built up between the walls, under the tile.  This is an idea of just how bad it was.  That wall that you see is the wall to daughter's room.

 

So, we moved daughter out of her room, sealed off that end of the house, and had contractors come in to remove the affected drywall and do mold remediation.  Once it was declared safe, husband decided that he could finish everything himself & save some money.

He slowly got the drywall back up in her room.  Within 12 months, she was able to move back into her bedroom.  (During this year, she had her bedroom set up in the dining room.)

But, the bathroom was a different story.

He replaced the drywall - but he never took the yellow tile off that the contractors said did not need to come off.  We put in a new tub - but the plumbing doesn't line up, and he can't figure out how to fix the plumbing so that it works.  There's no tile backer around the tub yet.  He keeps saying he's going to put "something" up, but it hasn't happened yet.  For several years now, we've had a non-functioning bathroom.  Oh, wait - the toilet works - and the sinks - but we have 5 people sharing 1 shower right now.  (I know, first world problems, right?)

Pictures of the bathroom in its current state:

That's styrofoam between the studs.  It's to replace the fiberglass insulation.

A view from the sink area.  Don't you just love all that yellow tile?

You see the solution that failed - adding a row of white tile on top of the yellow tile to seal the raw edge.

Moral of the story: NEVER buy a house from your in-laws.  (Do you think they've helped us fix anything in here?  Seriously?  If they had, don't you think we'd have that bathroom finished by now?)

I do have affiliate links in several of my posts. From now until we fix that bathroom, any and all money raised through my affiliate links is going to go into the "remodel the hallway bathroom" fund.  So, for those of you who click on a link, or buy something from one of my links, all I can say is:  THANK YOU!!!

This House

*This is another post from my old blog.  We spent the weekend working on the basement, and we were reminiscing about the time we pulled the freezer out of the basement.  This post originally ran on  Jan. 7, 2010. We bought our house from our in-laws in 2008.  When they moved out, they didn't clean out. We've been working on it ever since...

Cleaning out the basement in our house has proved to be a greater challenge than we were anticipating.

Once we finally got up the nerve to go into the basement, we wanted to run back upstairs again, screaming for our very lives!  Armed with trash bags, rubber gloves, and dust masks, we went down and began sifting through the piles of stuff in the basement.  The mind-numbing job of cleaning out the basement blurs in my mind.  There is one particular episode that stands out very clear.

The basement had turned into a repository of dead and unused appliances.  As we cleared out the trash, we were stunned at what we found underneath.  One freezer, circa. 1959.  One free standing stove, circa. 1962.  Two concrete sinks- you know, the laundry tub kind that your washing machine drain into.  The sinks were broken, but they were still in the basement.  Two old microwaves: One from 1978, and another from 1988.  One old stereo, four old speakers, and two old, broken television sets.  And three dehumidifiers. Somehow, these appliances needed to get out of our basement.
We borrowed a heavy-duty hand truck from my brother-in-law, and we borrowed a pick up truck from a friend.  My husband took a Friday off work, and we were ready to run to the dump.
The first things we hauled out were easy.  The microwaves, the dehumidifiers, the televisions, and the old stereos.  We had no problems hauling them out of the basement and out to the truck.  We loaded up our first load and hauled it off to the dump.

The large items in our basement presented more of a challenge.  The stove and the freezer.  Due to the odd turn at the top and bottom of the interior stairs, we could not take them up through the house.  We were going to have to use the walk-up from the basement.  It's a tight turn from the door up the stairs, but the basement door opens towards the concrete wall, so we thought we could get everything out through that door.  Husband managed to get the stove out and up the stairs with minimal help.  My job was to stand at ground level and hold the storm door on the basement open from above while he attempted to get the stove out and turned up the stairs.

And then came the big challenge.  The freezer.  That monster was heavy.  Much heavier than what we were anticipating.  We attempted to move it towards the door, but it was too heavy.  Husband pulled out the tool box and took the door off the freezer and hauled it out to the truck.

The freezer was still heavy, but with the two of us- we managed to get it onto the hand cart.  John took one handle of the cart, and I took the other and we carefully moved it over to the door.

Now, there's a problem we hadn't anticipated with the back door.  The door does not open all of the way.  When my in-laws finished the basement, they put a wall next to the basement door.  The interior door only opens up 90* from it's closed position.  It doesn't open all the way.  Try as we might, we could not get the freezer through that door.

We looked at each other, aghast.  Were we going to have to chop the freezer into tiny bits with the sledge hammer in order to get it out of the basement?  As we sat on the floor and pondered our options, we looked again at the door opening and the freezer.  It looked like we could get the freezer door through if we pulled the door off the hinges.  So, husband pulled out his tools and we took the basement door off the hinges and set it aside.

Once again, we wiggled and waggled the freezer, trying to figure out the magic angle to get it through the doorway.  No matter how we worked it, we could not get the freezer through that door.  It kept catching on the freezer hinges that had previously held the door.  Muttering unmentionable things under his breath, husband took the sledge hammer to the hinges on the freezer and pounded them into submission.  After 10 minutes, both hinges were pounded flat against the surface of the freezer.
Before we decided to attempt moving the freezer again, we took a good, hard look at the storm door.  It did not look as if we were going to be able to pull the freezer out of the basement without doing serious damage to the storm door.  Our biggest fear was that if we dropped the freezer while we were hauling it up the stairs, it would go hurtling down the steps and destroy the storm door.  Once again, out came the tool box and husband took the storm door off the hinges and gently set it inside, next to the door.

Muttering silently, we managed to pull the freezer out of the basement and turn it so that it was ready to be pulled up the stairs.

Heaven help us-- we were not prepared for the weight of that freezer.  I'm not certain how much it weighed, but I am willing to say it weighed at least 300 pounds.  It took two of us to pull that freezer up the basement steps.  We tilted the hand cart back until it would go back no more.  And then, we pulled it up a step.  Panting, we looked at each other.

"What do we do next?"  I asked.

"Slowly"  husband said, looking at the freezer and back at the 12 steps we still needed to haul the freezer up.  "Shift yourself up a step.  I'll hold the freezer while you move.  Then you hold the freezer and I'll shift up a step."

We moved ourselves around and then, on the count of three, we pulled the freezer up the next step.  We continued on in this slow and painful manner until, two hours later we finally pulled the freezer up the last step and onto the level ground.  Too tired to even talk to each other, we pulled the freezer over to the truck and stopped dead.

We were going to have to lift that freezer over 2 feet at once to get it into the bed of the truck.

"I've got an idea" said husband.  We live on the top of a hill, and the driveway slopes down steeply from the carport to street level.  Husband had the truck backed up the driveway.  He pulled the car part way down the driveway, until the back of the truck was only a little above the carport.  He then found a heavy duty piece of wood that he used as a ramp to cover the short distance from the carport pad to the truck bed.  We pulled the freezer up into the bed of the truck with minimal effort and tied it tightly down to the bed of the truck.  He left the freezer on the hand cart, and put blocks under the wheels of the cart.

Once we got to the dump, we used the same board to make a ramp from the truck bed to the ground, untied the freezer and pulled it down the ramp.  When the freezer was halfway down the ramp, the wood splintered, and the freezer came crashing down to the ground. 

At that point, the staff took pity on us.  They took charge of the freezer and the splintered wooden ramp.  We put the remains of the hand truck in the back and headed back home.

But what about the basement doors?  We so desperately wanted that freezer out of our lives that we left the house with the basement doors sitting in the middle of the basement!

Trapped, by God! I was trapped!

I briefly mentioned our hall bathroom yesterday.

Last night, I used that bathroom.  As usual, I shut the door behind me.

When I attempted to leave the bathroom, the doorknob would not turn, and when it did turn, it didn't turn enough to clear the metal plate in the door jamb.

I banged on the door, and husband came running.  He attempted to push the door open.  He attempted to throw himself against the door, and it still wouldn't give.  I guess hollow core doors were made of higher quality stuff back in the seventies!!

Husband got his toolbox and began trying to remove the doorknob.

Meanwhile, I was in a toasty little room where I had access to water and (even more important) the toilet.  If push came to shove, I could curl up and sleep in the bathtub.

I was sitting there, listening to the sounds of tinkering when I heard a knock on the window behind me.  Oldest child had come around through the outside of the house and was going to help me.

Somehow, he managed to squeeze his six foot frame through the tiny window over the toilet.

As oldest child began working on the doorknob from the inside with a pair of scissors and a scout knife, there came a soft tap at the window, and middle child heaved himself into the bathroom, quickly followed by youngest child.

Picture if you will, a hall bathroom with four people squeezed inside.   My kids aren't young kids, either.  They're 16, 18, and 20!

It was awesome family togetherness time!

The boys finally got the door opened, and we all tumbled out of the bathroom into the hall.

Making memories together.  Yep, this one will go right up there at the top of the  list!