Weekend Work

We were busy little bees this weekend and got a lot done on various projects. First we finished the sheetrocking on 3 walls and moved on to the closet-to-be wall.

That little alcove was walled off  and not part of the bedroom  but does have a  plastered wall and ceiling and the same (but unfinished) baseboard as the rest of the bedroom. We still can't figure out why it was built like that originally, but we took down the bedroom wall and will add that to our new closet area, so we had to close the opening into our attic.

 That picture was taken from the attic side and you can see the bark still on that old post. We had just enough scrap pieces of drywall left to close this in. Some of the pieces had been saved from the kitchen work from, oh, about 4 years ago. And that is why we save stuff.

Now, J has lots of taping and mudding ahead of him, plus we have to figure out how we are building the drawer and closet wall.

That yellow paper we could see between that wall as we tore it down? Not so exciting- a video store receipt from 1990. But after Ameranth told us that her brothers used to squeeze in that 10 inch space to thump on her walls and scare her, we hadn't expected anything too wonderful.

We moved our cat and her kitten out of our front hall, which is wonderful! We had installed a sliding door to keep the puppies away from the cat food, shortly after we got Anna and Rosie.  It has a little cat door on the bottom and worked great until we had kittens. Kittens climb.

Those kittens are long gone, but our dogs soon learned to slide the door open, so we used an old flatiron to wedge it closed. I think I've mentioned Anna's fixation with small prey- she has been living on the rug in front of the door, waiting for a chance to slip in for some take-out. She learned how to tip the iron out of the crack, so we added a footstool to block the iron. (And for those of you who ask "why not just put a handle on the door?" I ask "Have you been talking to J?" We haven't put up the ceiling trim or replaced the floor on the outer side of the door yet, so we are waiting for the permanent solution).

Anyhoo, when the kitten started walking around, we had to block the cat door, or Anna would have gotten her head in there and snapped her up. It got so it was like getting through a prison lockdown to get in or out of the house. The cats were moved outside to the attached shed, which meant we had to move a wooden box we keep returnable bottles in, close off an opening to the upstairs storage and clear out a space under the staircase. Now they have a cosy space with a window egress and I have no litter box indoors! Hurray!

As well as moving the litter box, we moved our string and liquor cabinet. Yes, that's right. Years ago we bought a shelving unit for storage, before our pantry was complete. J stashed a ball of twine and a bottle of rum there, and when Ms.M saw it, she asked sarcastically if that was our string and liquor cabinet. We've called it that ever since, although our liquor stash consists, ironically enough, of  a couple of bottles of brandy and wine that Ms. M brought home from her Peace Corps service in Moldova. That's gone and we can reinstall the coat hooks which will  be used much more than the liquor was.

Now we can get to replacing that front hall floor. Sometime soon, I am sure.